LIBRARY 

OF  THE 


UNivERSitY  OF  CALIFORNIA. 

v  &  \  N 

X 
Class  ^ 


THE  STUDY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERHTURE. 


THREE  ESSAYS. 


I.     THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE. 

By  JOHN  MORLEY. 

II.    HINTS  ON  THE  STUDY  OF  ENGLISH 

LITERATURE. 

By  HENRY  J.  NICOLL. 

III.     THE   STUDY   OF    ENGLISH    LITER A- 

'TURE. 

By  LESLIE  STEPHEN. 


WITH  AN  INTRODUCTION  AND  NOTES 
BY 

ALBERT   F.   BLAISDELL, 

AUTHOR   OF    "  THE   STUDY   OF  ENGLISH   CLASSICS,"    "  FIRST  STEPS 
WITH   AMERICAN   AND    BRITISH    AUTHORS,"    ETC. 


BOSTON: 

WILLARD    SMALL,   PUBLISHER, 

No.  24  FRANKLIN  STREET. 

1902. 


PRESS  OF 

ALFRED  MUDGE  &  SON, 
BOSTON. 


CONTENTS. 


PAGE 

I.    THE  STUDY   OF  LITERATURE.      AN 

ADDRESS  BY  JOHN  MORLEY 3 


II.  HINTS  ON  THE  STUDY  OF  ENG- 
LISH LITERATURE.  HENRY  Ni- 
COLL'S  INTRODUCTION  TO  "LANDMARKS 
OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE  " 43 

III.  THE  STUDY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERA- 
TURE. AN  ADDRESS  BY  LESLIE  STE- 
PHEN   71 


INTRODUCTION. 


SINCE  the  publication  of  a  series  of 
articles  two  years  ago  in  the  London  Pall 
Mall  Gazette  and  other  periodicals  on  the 
"Best  Hundred  Books,"  the  discussion 
has  branched  off  on  to  the  subject  of 
English  literature.  The  leading  English 
periodicals  have  furnished  one  or  more 
articles  for  the  discussion.  Of  the  note- 
worthy contributions,  two  have  attracted 
the  attention  of  students  of  literature, 
both  from  the  reputation  of  the  authors 
and  the  real  worth  of  their  literary  pro- 
ductions. We  refer  to  the  annual  address 
of  last  year,  given  by  John  Morley  to  the 
students  of  the  London  Society  for  the 
Extension  of  University  Teaching,  Feb. 
26,  1887,  and  a  lecture  delivered  by  Leslie 
Stephen  to  the  Students'  Association  of 
St.  Andrews,  March  26,  1887. 

The  text  of  these  two  addresses  has 
been  given  in  full  in  the  succeeding  pages. 


2  INTRODUCTION. 

Such  men  as  Morley  and  Stephen  do  not 
lecture  unless  they  have  something  to  say. 
What  they  have  to  say  on  English  litera- 
ture is  of  special  weight,  for  they  have 
made  it  a  life-long  study.  Hence  these 
addresses  are  scholarly,  crisp,  and  inter- 
esting. To  these  two  articles  we  have 
added  a  third,  "  Hints  on  the  Study  of 
English  Literature,"  by  Henry  J.  Nicoll, 
the  introductory  chapter  to  his  excellent 
text-book  called  "Landmarks  of  English 
Literature"  This  was  written  several 
years  ago,  but  it  is  of  special  interest  to 
students  in  connection  with  the  two  ad- 
dresses. 

Such  notes  have  been  added  as  will 
serve  to  make  the  text  more  easily  under- 
stood by  the  general  reader.  It  is  to  be 
hoped  that  the  three  articles  will  be  help- 
ful and  stimulating  to  teachers  and  stu- 
dents of  English  literature. 

ALBERT   F.  BLAISDELL 
PROVIDENCE,  R.  I.,  August,  1888. 


UNIVE,-- 

OF 

s^L;r 


ON  THE 

STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

THE   ANNUAL   ADDRESS 

10  THE  STUDENTS  OF  THE  LONDON  SOCIETY  FOR 

THE  EXTENSION  OF  UNIVERSITY  TEACHING, 

DELIVERED   AT   THE    MANSION   HOUSE, 

FEBRUARY     26,    1887 

BY   JOHN    MORLEY1 


WHEN  my  friend  Mr.  Goschen2  invited 
me  to  discharge  the  duty  which  has  fal- 
len to  me  this  afternoon  I  confess  that  I 
complied  with  very  great  misgivings.  He 
desired  me  to  say  something,  if  I  could, 
on  the  literary  side  of  education.  Now, 
it  is  almost  impossible — and  I  think  those 

1The  Right  Honorable  John  Morley  was  born  in  1838,  gradu- 
ated at  Oxford  and  is  a  lawyer  by  profession.  He  was  editor  of  the 
Fortnightly  Review  from  1867  to  1882,  of  the  Pall  Mall  Gazette 
from  1880  to  1883,  and  of  Macntillarfs  Magazine  from  1883  to 
1885.  On  the  formation  of  Gladstone's  Home  Rule  Cabinet  in  1886, 
Mr.  Morley  was  made  Chief  Secretary  for  Ireland.  He  has  been  a 
prominent  member  of  the  House  of  Parliament.  Mr.  Morley  has 
made  many  and  notable  contributions  to  literature.  Among  them, 
are  "Edward  Burke"  "Voltaire,"  "Rousseau,"  and  "Richard 
Cobden."  He  is  the  editor  of  the  well  known  "  English  Men  of 
Letters  Series." 

2  The  Right  Honorable  George  Joachim  Goschen,  Chancellor  of 
the  Exchequer,  born  in  1831  and  graduated  at  Oxford.  He  has 
written  largely  on  financial  questions. 


4  ON    THE    STUDY 

who  know  most  of  literature  will  be  read- 
iest to  agree  with  me  —  to  say  anything 
new  in  recommendation  of  literature  in  a 
scheme  of  education.  But,  as  tax-payers 
know,  when  the  Chancellor  of  the  Ex- 
chequer levies  a  contribution,  he  is  not  a 
person  to  be  trifled  with.  I  have  felt, 
moreover,  that  Mr.  Goschen  has  worked 
with  such  extreme  zeal  and  energy  for  so 
many  years  on  behalf  of  this  good  cause, 
that  anybody  whom  he  considered  able  to 
render  him  any  co-operation,  owed  it  to 
him  in  its  fullest  extent.  The  Lord  May- 
or has  been  kind  enough  to  say  that  I  am 
especially  qualified  to  speak  on  English 
literature.  I  must,  however,  remind  the 
Lord  Mayor  that  I  have  strayed  from  lit- 
erature into  the  region  of  politics;  and  I 
am  not  at  all  sure  that  such  a  journey  con- 
duces to  the  soundness  of  one's  judgment 
on  literary  subjects,  or  adds  much  to  the 
force  of  one's  arguments  on  behalf  of  lit- 
erary study.  Politics  are  a  field  where 
action  is  one  long  second-best,  and  where 
the  choice  constantly  lies  between  two 
blunders.  Nothing  can  be  more  unlike  in 
aim,  in  ideals,  in  method,  and  in  matter, 
than  are  literature  and  politics.  I  have, 
however,  determined  to  do  the  best  that  I 
can ;  and  I  feel  how  great  an  honor  it  is 
to  be  invited  to  partake  in  a  movement 
which  I  do  not  scruple  to  call  one  of  the 


OF    LITERATURE.  5 

most  important  of  all   those   now   taking 
place  in  English  society. 

What  is  the  object  of  the  movement?1 
What  do  the  promoters  aim  at  ?  I  take 
it  that  what  they  aim  at  is  to  bring  the 
very  best  teaching  that  the  country  can 
afford,  through  the  hands  of  the  most 
thoroughly  competent  men,  within  the 
reach  of  every  class  of  the  community. 
Their  object  is  to  give  to  the  many  that 
sound,  systematic,  and  methodical  knowl- 
edge, which  has  hitherto  been  the  privilege 
of  the  few  who  can  afford  the  time  and 
money  to  go  to  Oxford  and  Cambridge  ;  to 
diffuse  the  fertilizing  waters  of  intellect- 
ual knowledge  from  their  great  and  copious 
fountain  heads  at  the  Universities  by  a 
thousand  irrigating  channels  over  the  whole 
of  our  busy,  indomitable  land.  Gentlemen, 
this  a  most  important  point.  Goethe  said 
that  nothing  is  more  frightful  than  a 
teacher  who  only  knows  what  his  scholars 
are  intended  to  know.  We  may  depend 
upon  it  that  the  man  that  knows  his  own 
subject  most  thoroughly,  is  most  likely  to 
excite  interest  about  it  in  the  minds  of 
other  people.  We  hear,  perhaps,  more 
often  than  we  like,  that  we  live  in  a  dem- 
ocratic age.  It  is  true  enough,  and  I  can 
conceive  nothing  more  democratic  than 
such  a  movement  as  this,  nothing  which 

1  See  Appendix. 


6  ON    THE    STUDY 

is  more  calculated  to  remedy  defects  that 
are  incident  to  democracy,  more  thorough- 
ly calculated  to  raise  democracy  to  heights 
which  other  forms  of  government  and  old- 
er orderings  of  society  have  never  yet  at- 
tained. No  movement  can  be  more  wise^ 
ly  democratic  than  one  which  seeks  to\ 
give  to  the  northern  miner  or  the  London 
artisan  knowledge  as  good  and  as  accurate 
though  he  may  not  have  so  much  of  it,  as 
if  he  were  a  student  at  Oxford  or  Cam- 
bridge. Something  of  the  same  kind  may 
be  said  of  the  new  frequency  with  which 
scholars  of  great  eminence  and  consum- 
mate accomplishments,  like  Jowett,  Lang, 
Myers,  Leaf,  and  others,  bring  all  their 
scholarship  to  bear,  in  order  to  provide 
for  those  who  are  not  able,  or  do  not  care, 
to  read  old  classics  in  the  originals,  bril- 
liant and  faithful  renderings  of  them  in 
our  own  tongue.  Nothing  but  good,  I  j 
am  persuaded,  can  come  of  all  these  at- 
tempts to  connect  learning  with  the  living 
forces  of  society,  and  to  make  industrial 
England  a  sharer  in  the  classic  tradition 
of  the  lettered  world. 
~ f  I  am  well  aware  that  there  is  an  appre- 

/hension  that  the  present  extraordinary  zeal 
for  education  in  all  its  forms — elementary, 
secondary,  and  higher  —  may  bear  in  its 
train  some  evils  of  its  own.  It  is  said  that 
nobody  in  England  is  now  content  to  prac- 


OF    LITERATURE.  *J 

tise  a  handicraft,  and  that  every  one  seeks 
to  be  at  least  a  clerk.  It  is  said  that  the 
moment  is  even  already  at  hand  when  a 
great  deal  of  practical  distress  does  and 
must  result  from  this  tendency.  I  remem- 
ber years  ago  that  in  the  United  States  I 
heard  something  of  the  same  kind.  All  I 
can  say  is,  that  this  tendency,  if  it  exists, 
is  sure  to  right  itself.  In  no  case  can  the 
spread  of  so  mischievous  a  notion  as  that 
knowledge  and  learning  ought  not  to  come 
within  the  reach  of  handicraftsmen,  be  at- 
tributed to  literature.  There  is  a  famous 
passage  in  which  Pericles,  the  great  Athe- 
nian, describing  the  glory  of  the  commu- 
nity of  which  he  was  so  far-shining  a  mem- 
ber, says,  "We  at  Athens  are  lovers  of  the 
beautiful,  yet  simple  in  our  tastes ;  we  cul-> 
tivate  the  mind  without  loss  of  manliness."/ 
But  then  remember  that  after  all  Athenian 
society  rested  on  a  basis  of  slavery,  Athen- 
ian citizens  were  able  to  pursue  their  love 
of  the  beautiful,  and  their  simplicity,  and 
to  cultivate  their  minds  without  loss  of 
manliness,  because  the  drudgery  and  hard 
work  and  rude  service  of  society  were  per- 
formed by  those  who  had  no  share  in  all 
these  good  things.  With  us,  happily,  it  is 
very  different  We  are  all  more  or  less 
upon  a  level.  Our  object  is — and  it  is  that 
which  in  my  opinion  raises  us  infinitely 
above  the  Athenian  level  —  to  bring  the 


ON    THE    STUDY 

Periclean  ideas  of  beauty  and  simplicity 
and  cultivation  of  the  mind  within  the 
reach  of  those  who  do  the  drudgery  and 
the  service  and  rude  work  of  the  world. 
And  it  can  be  done  —  do  not  let  us  be 
afraid — it  can  be  done  without  in  the  least 
degree  impairing  the  skill  of  our  handi- 
craftsmen or  the  manliness  of  our  national 
life.  It  can  be  done  without  blunting  or 
numbing  the  practical  energies  of  our  peo- 
ple. 

I  know  they  say  that  if  you  meddle  with 
literature  you  are  less  qualified  to  take 
your  part  in  practical  affairs.  You  run  a 
risk  of  being  labelled  a  dreamer  and  a 
theorist.  But,  after  all,  if  we  take  the  very 
highest  form  of  all  practical  energy  —  the 
governing  of  the  country  —  all  this  talk  is 
ludicrously  untrue.  I  venture  to  say  that 
in  the  present  Government,  from  the  Prime 
Minister  downwards,  there  are  three  men 
at  least,  who  are  perfectly  capable  of  earn- 
ing their  bread  as  men  of  letters.  In  the 
late  Government,  besides  the  Prime  Minis- 
ter, there  were  also  three  men  of  letters, 
and  I  have  never  heard  that  those  three 
were  greater  simpletons  than  their  neigh- 
bors. There  is  a  Commission  now  at  work 
on  a  very  important  and  abstruse  subject. 
I  am  told  that  no  one  there  displays  so 
acute  an  intelligence  of  the  difficulties  that 
are  to  be  met,  and  the  important  argu- 


OF    LITERATURE.  9 

ments  that  are  brought  foward,  and  the 
practical  ends  to  be  achieved,  as  the  chair- 
man of  the  Commission,  who  is  not  what 
is  called  a  practical  man,  but  a  man  of 
study,  literature,  theoretical  speculation, 
and  university  training.  Oh  no,  gentle- 
men, some  of  the  best  men  of  business  in 
the  country  are  men  who  have  had  the 
best  collegian's  equipment,  and  are  the 
most  accomplished  bookmen. 

It  is  true  that  we  cannot  bring  to  Lon- 
don with  this  movement,  the  indefinable 
charms  that  haunU  the  gray  and  venerable 
quadrangles  of  Oxford  and  Cambridge.  We 
cannot  take  you  into  the  stately  halls,  the 
silent  and  venerable  libraries,  the  solemn 
chapels,  the  studious  old-world  gardens. 
We  cannot  surround  you  with  all  those 
elevated  memorials  and  sanctifying  associa- 
tions of  scholars  and  poets,  of  saints  and 
sages,  that  march  in  glorious  procession 
through  the  ages,  and  make  of  Oxford  and 
Cambridge  a  dream  of  music  for  the  in- 
ward ear,  and  of  delight  for  the  contempla- 
tive eye.  We  cannot  bring  all  that  to  you; 
but  I  hope,  and  I  believe,  it  is  the  object 
of  those  who  are  more  intimately  connect- 
ed with  the  society  than  I  have  been,  that 
every  partaker  of  the  benefits  of  this  so- 
ciety will  feel  himself  and  herself  in  living 
connection  with  those  two  famous  centres, 
and  feel  conscious  of  the  links  that  bind 


IO  ON   THE   STUDY 

the  modern  to  the  older  England.  One 
of  the  most  interesting  facts  mentioned  in 
your  report  this  year— and  I  am  particular- 
ly interested  in  it  for  personal  reasons — is 
that  last  winter  four  prizes  of  £10  each 
were  offered  in  the  Northumberland  mi- 
ning district,  one  each  to  the  male  and 
female  student  in  every  term  who  should 
take  the  highest  place  in  the  examination, 
in  order  to  enable  them  to  spend  a  month 
in  Cambridge  in  the  long  vacation  for  the 
purpose  of  carrying  on  in  the  laboratories 
and  museums  the  work  in  which  they  had 
been  engaged  in  the  winter  at  the  local 
centre.  That  is  not  a  step  taken  by  our 
society;  but  Cambridge  University  has 
inspired  and  worked  out  the  scheme,  and 
I  am  not  without  hope  that  from  London 
some  of  those  who  attend  these  classes 
may  be  able  to  go  and  have  a  taste  of 
what  Oxford  and  Cambridge  are  like.  I 
like  to  think  how  poor  scholars  three  or 
four  hundred  years  ago  used  to  flock  to 
Oxford,  regardless  of  cold,  privation,  and 
hardship,  so  that  they  might  satisfy  their 
hunger  and  thirst  for  knowledge.  I  like 
to  think  of  them  in  connection  with  this 
movement.  I  like  to  think  of  them  in 
connection  with  students  like  those  miners 
in  Northumberland,  whom  I  know  well, 
and  who  are  mentioned  in  the  report  of 
the  Cambridge  Extension  Society  as,  after 


OF    LITERATURE.  II 

a  day's  hard  work  in  the  pit,  walking  four 
or  five  miles  through  cold  and  darkness 
and  rough  roads  to  hear  a  lecture,  and 
then  walking  back  again  the  same  four  or 
five  miles.  You  must  look  for  the  same  en- 
thusiasm, the  same  hunger  and  thirst  for 
knowledge,  that  presided  over  the  founda- 
tion of  the  Universities  many  centuries 
ago,  to  carry  on  this  work,  to  strengthen 
and  stimulate  men's  faith  in  knowledge, 
their  hopes  from  it,  and  their  zeal  for  it. 

The  progress  of  the  Society  has  been 
most  remarkable.1  In  1876  there  were,  I 
find,  five  centres  and  seven  courses.  This 
year  there  are  thirty-one  centres  and  sixty 
courses.  But  to  get  a  survey  of  this  move- 
ment, you  must  look  not  only  at  London, 
but  at  the  Oxford  and  Cambridge  societies. 
You  find  there  that  Oxford  has  twenty-two 
centres  and  twenty-nine  courses,  and  Cam- 
bridge has  fifty  centres  and  eighty  courses. 
I  say  that  the  thought  of  all  this  activity, 
and  all  the  good  of  every  kind,  social, 
moral,  and  intellectual,  which  is  being 
done  by  means  of  it,  is  in  the  highest  de- 
gree encouraging,  and  not  only  encourag- 
ing, but  calculated  to  inspire  in  every  man 
who  has  ever  felt  the  love  and  thirst  for 
knowledge,  the  deepest  interest  in  the 
movement  and  the  warmest  wishes  for  its 
farther  success. 

1  See  Table  in  Appendix, 


12  ON    THE    STUDY 

Speaking  now  of  the  particular  kind  of 
knowledge  of  which  I  am  going  to  say  a 
few  words  —  how  does  literature  fare  in 
these  important  operations?  Last  term 
out  of  fifty-seven  courses  in  the  Cambridge 
scheme  there  were  ten  on  literature ;  out 
of  thirty-one  of  our  courses,  seven  were 
on  literature.  Well,  I  am  bound  to  say 
I  think  that  that  position  for  literature  in 
the  scheme  is  very  reasonably  satisfactory. 
I  have  made  some  inquiries,  since  I  knew 
that  I  was  going  to  speak  here,  in  the 
great  popular  centres  of  industry  in  the 
North  and  in  Scotland  as  to  the  popularity 
of  literature  as  a  subject  of  teaching.  I 
find  very  much  what  I  should  have  ex- 
pected. The  professors  all  tell  very  much 
the  same  story.  This  is,  that  it  is  extreme- 
ly hard  to  interest  any  considerable  number 
of  people  in  subjects  that  seem  to  have  no 
direct  bearing  upon  the  practical  work  of 
every-day  life.  There  is  a  disinclination  to 
study  literature  for  its  own  sake,  or  to  study 
anything  which  does  not  seem  to  have  a 
visible  and  direct  influence  upon  the  daily 
work  of  life.  The  nearest  approach  to  a 
taste  for  literature  is  a  certain  demand  for 
instruction  in  history  with  a  little  flavor 
of  contemporary  politics.  In  short,  the 
demand  for  instruction  in  literature  is 
strictly  moderate.  That  is  what  men  of 
experience  tell  me,  and  we  have  to  recog- 


OF    LITERATURE.  13 

nise  it.  I  cannot  profess  to  be  very  much 
surprised.  Mr.  Goschen,  when  he  spoke — 
I  think  in  Manchester — some  years  ago, 
said  there  were  three  motives  which  might 
induce  people  to  seek  the  higher  education. 
First,  to  obtain  greater  knowledge  for 
bread-winning  purposes.  From  that  point 
of  view  science  would  be  most  likely  to 
feed  the  classes.  Secondly,  the  improve- 
ment of  one's  knowledge  of  political  econ- 
omy, and  history,  and  facts  bearing  upon 
the  actual  political  work  and  life  of  the  day. 
Thirdly, — and  I  am  quite  content  to  take 
Mr.  Goschen's  enumeration, —  was  the  de- 
sire of  knowledge  as  a  luxury  to  brighten 
life  and  kindle  thought.  I  am  very  much 
afraid  that,  in  the  ordinary  temper  of  our 
people,  and  the  ordinary  mode  of  looking 
at  life,  the  last  of  these  motives  savors  a 
little  of  self-indulgence,  sentimentality, 
and  other  objectionable  qualities.  There 
is  a  great  stir  in  the  region  of  physical 
science  at  this  moment,  and  it  is,  in  my 
judgment,  likely  to  take  a  chief  and  fore- 
most place  in  the  field  of  intellectual  ac- 
tivity. After  the  severity  with  which 
science  was  for  so  many  ages  treated  by 
literature,  I  cannot  wonder  that  science  now 
retaliates,  now  mightily  exalt  herself,  and 
thrusts  literature  down  into  the  lower  place. 
I  only  have  to  say  on  the  relative  claims  of 
science  and  literature  what  the  great  Dr. 


14  ON   THE    STUDY 

Arnold  said: — "If  one  might  wish  for  im- 
possibilities, I  might  then  wish  that  my' 
children  might  be  well  versed  in  physical 
science,  but  in  due  subordination  to  the 
fulness  and  freshness  of  their  knowledge 
on  moral  subjects.  This,  however,  I  be- 
lieve cannot  be ;  wherefore,  rather  than 
have  it  the  principal  thing  in  my  sons' 
mind,  I  would  gladly  have  him  think  that 
the  sun  went  round  the  earth,  and  that 
the  stars  were  so  many  spangles  set  in  the 
bright  blue  firmament."1  I  am  glad  to 
think  that  one  may  know  something  of 
these  matters,  and  yet  not  believe  that 
the  sun  goes  round  the  earth.  But  of  the 
two,  I,  for  one,  am  not  prepared  to  accept 
the  rather  enormous  pretensions  that  are 
nowadays  sometimes  made  for  physical 
science  as  the  be-all  and  end-all  of  educa- 
tion. 

Next  to  this  we  know  that  there  is  a 
great  stir  on  behalf  of  technical  and  com- 
mercial education.  The  special  needs  of 
our  time  and  country  compel  us  to  pay  a 
particular  attention  to  this  subject.  Here 
knowledge  is  business,  and  we  shall  never 
hold  our  industrial  pre-eminence,  with  all 
that  hangs  upon  that  pre-eminence,  unless 
we  push  on  technical  and  commercial  edu- 
cation with  all  our  might.  But  there  is — 
and  now  I  come  nearer  my  subject- 

1  Stanley's  Life  of  Arnold,  ii.  31. 


OF    LITERATURE.  15 

third  kind  of  knowledge  which,  too,  in  its 
own  way  is  business.  There  is  the  culti- 
vation of  the  sympathies  and  imagination, 
the  quickening  of  the  moral  sensibilities, 
an4  the  enlargement  of  the  moral  vision. 
(The  great  need  in  our  modern  culture,  I 
Which  is  scientific  in  method,  rationalistic  / 
in  spirit,  and  utilitarian  in  purpose,  is  to 
find  some  effectivejierency  for  cherishing  ^ 
within  us  the  ideajTy  That  is,  I  take  it, 
the  business  anoTmnction  of  literatun_ 
Literature  alone  wilLnp.t.make  a.^ood  citi- 
zen ;  it  will  not  make  a  good  man.  His- 
tory affords  too  many  proofs  that  scholar- 
ship and  learning  by  no  means  purge  men 
of  acrimony,  of  vanity,  of  arrogance,  of  a 
murderous  tenacity  about  trifles.  Mere 
scholarship  and  learning  and  the  knowl- 
edge of  books  do  not  by  any  means  arrest 
and  dissolve  all  the  travelling  acids  of  the 
human  system.  Nor  would  I  pretend  for 
a  moment  that  literature  can  be  any  sub- 
stitute for  life  and  action.  Burke  said, 
"What  is  the  education  of  the  generality 
of  the  world  ?  Reading  a  parcel  of  books  ? 
No  !  Restraint  and  discipline,  examples  of 
virtue  and  justice,  these  are  what  form 
the  education  of  the  world."  That  is  pro- 
foundly true  ;  it  is  life  that  is  the  great 
educator.  But  the  parcel  of  books,  if  they 
are  well  chosen,  reconcile  us  to  this  disci- 
pline ;  they  interpret  this  virtue  and  justice  ; 


1 6  ON    THE    STUDY 

they  awaken  within  us  the  diviner  mind, 
and  rouse  us  to  a  consciousness  of  what 
is  best  in  others  and  ourselves. 

As  a  matter  of  rude  fact,  there  is  much 
to  make  us  question  whether  the  spread 
of  literature,  as  now  understood,  does 
awaken  the  diviner  mind.  The  figures  of 
the  books  that  are  taken  out  from  public 
libraries  are  not  all  that  we  could  wish. 
I  am  not  going  to  inflict  many  figures  on 
you,  but  there  is  one  set  of  figures  that 
distresses  book-lovers,  I  mean  the  enormous 
place  that  fiction  occupies  in  the  books 
taken  out.  In  one  great  town  in  the  North 
prose  fiction  forms  76  per  cent  of  the 
books  taken  out.  In  another  great  town 
prose  fiction  is  82  per  cent ;  in  a  third  84 
per  cent ;  and  in  a  fourth  67  per  cent.  I 
had  the  curiosity  to  see  what  happens  in 
the  libraries  of  the  United  States ;  and 
there — supposing  the  system  of  catalogu- 
ing and  enumeration  to  be  the  same — they 
are  a  trifle  more  serious  in  their  taste  than 
we  are ;  where  our  average  is  about  70  per 
cent,  at  a  place  like  Chicago  it  is  only 
about  60  per  cent.  In  Scotland,  too,  it 
ought  to  be  said  that  they  have  what  I 
call  a  better  average  in  respect  to  prose 
fiction.  There  is  a  larger  demand  for 
books  called  serious  than  in  England. 
And  I  suspect,  though  I  do  not  know,  that 
one  reason  why  there  is  in  Scotland  a 


OF    LITERATURE.  1? 

greater  demand  for  the  more  serious  classes 
of  literature  than  fiction,  is  that  in  Scotch 
Universities  there  are  what  we  have  not  in 
England  —  well-attended  chairs  of  litera- 
ture, systematically  and  methodically  stud- 
ied.  Do  not  let  it  be  supposed  that  I  at 
all  underrate  the  value  of  fiction.  On  the 
contrary,  I  think  when  a  man  has  done  a 
hard  day's  work,  he  can  do  nothing  better 
than  fall  to  and  read  the  novels  of  Walter 
Scott  or  Miss  Austen,  or  some  of  our  living 
writers.  I  am  rather  a  voracious  reader  of 
fiction  myself.  I  do  not,  therefore,  point  to 
it  as  a  reproach  or  as  a  source  of  discour- 
agement that  fiction  takes  so  large  a  place 
in  the  objects  of  literary  interest.  I  only 
insist  that  it  is  much  too  large,  and  we 
should  be  better  pleased  if  it  sank  to  about 
40  per  cent,  and  what  is  classified  as  gen- 
eral literature  rose  from  13  to  25  per  cent. 
There  are  other  complaints  of  literature 
as  an  object  of  interest  in  this  country.  I 
was  reading  the  other  day  an  essay  by  the 
late  head  of  my  old  college  at  Oxford — a 
very  learned  and  remarkable  man  —  Mark 
Pattison,1  who  was  a  book-lover  if  ever 
there  was  one.  Now,  he  complained  that 
the  bookseller's  bill  in  the  ordinary  Eng- 

*Mark  Pattison  (  1813-1884)  the  distinguished  Rector  of  Oriel 
College,  Oxford,  and  famous  scholar,  made  many  valuable  con- 
tributions to  literature.  He  is  well  known  for  his  writings  on 
John  Milton. 


1 8  ON   THE    STUDY 

lish  middle  class  family  is  shamefully  small. 
He  thought  it  monstrous  that  a  man  who 
is  earning  .£1000  a  year  should  spend  less 
than  £i  a  week  on  books  —  that  is  to  say, 
less  than  a  shilling  in  the  pound  per  an- 
num. Well,  I  know  that  Chancellors  of 
the  Exchequer  take  from  us  8d.  or  6d.  in 
the  pound,  and  I  am  not  sure  that  they 
always  use  it  as  wisely  as  if  they  left  us  to 
spend  it  on  books.  Still,  a  shilling  in  the 
pound  to  be  spent  on  books  by  a  clerk 
who  earns  a  couple  of  hundred  pounds  a 
year,  or  by  a  workman  who  earns  a  quarter 
of  that  sum,  is  rather  more,  I  think,  than 
can  be  reasonably  expected.  I  do  not 
believe  for  my  part  that  a  man  really 
needs  to  have  a  great  many  books.  Patti- 
son  said  that  nobody  who  respected  him- 
self could  have  less  than  1000  volumes. 
He  pointed  out  that  you  can  stack  1000 
octavo  volumes  in  a  book-case  that  shall 
be  13  feet  by  10  feet,  and  6  inches  deep, 
and  that  everybody  has  that  space  at  dis- 
posal. Still  the  point  is  not  that  men 
should  have  a  great  many  books,  but  that 
they  should  have  the  right  ones,  and  that 
they  should  use  those  that  they  have.  We 
may  all  agree  in  lamenting  that  there  are 
so  many  houses  —  even  some  of  consider- 
able social  pretension  —  where  you  will 
not  find  a  good  atlas,  a  good  dictionary, 
or  a  good  cyclopaedia  of  reference.  What 


OF    LITERATURE.  19 

is  still  more  lamentable,  in  a  good  many 
more  houses  where  these  books  are,  they 
are  never  referred  to,  or  opened.  That  is 
a  very  discreditable  fact,  because  I  defy 
anybody  to  take  up  a  copy  of  the  Times 
newspaper  —  and  I  speak  in  the  presence 
of  gentlemen  well  up  in  all  that  is  going 
on  in  the  world  —  and  not  come  upon 
something  in  it,  upon  which  they  would 
be  wise  to  consult  an  atlas,  dictionary,  or 
cyclopaedia  of  reference. 

I  do  not  think  for  a  single  moment  that 
everybody  is  born  with  the  ability  for 
using  books,  for  reading  and  studying  liter- 
ature. Certainly  not  everybody  is  born 
with  the  capacity  of  being  a  great  scholar. 
All  people  are  no  more  born  great  scholars 
like  Gibbon  and  Bentley,  than  they  are  all 
born  great  musicians  like  Handel  and 
Beethoven.  What  is  much  worse  than 
that,  many  are  born  with  the  incapacity  of 
reading,  just  as  they  are  born  with  the 
incapacity  of  distinguishing  one  tune  from 
another.  To  them  I  have  nothing  to  say. 
Even  the  morning  paper  is  too  much  for 
them.  They  can  only  skim  the  surface 
even  of  that.  I  go  farther,  and  I  frankly 
admit  that  the  habit  and  power  of  read- 
ing with  reflection,  comprehension,  and 
memory  all  alert  and  awake,  does  not 
come  at  once  to  the  natural  man,  any 
more  than  many  other  sovereign  virtues 


2O  ON    THE    STUDY 

come  to  that  interesting  creature.  What 
I  do  submit  to  you  and  press  upon  you 
with  great  earnestness  is,  that  it  requires 
no  preterhuman  force  of  will  in  any  young 
man  or  woman — unless  household  circum- 
stances are  unusually  vexatious  and  un- 
favorable— to  get  at  least  half  an  hour  out 
of  a  solid  busy  day  for  good  and  dis- 
interested reading.  Some  will  say  that 
this  is  toomuch  to  except,  and  the  first 
persons  to  say  it,  I  venture  to  predict,  will 
be  those  who  waste  their  time  most.  At 
any  rate,  if  I  cannot  get  half  an  hour  I 
will  be  content  with  a  quarter.  Now,  in 
half  an  hour  I  fancy  you  can  read  fifteen 
or  twenty  pages  of  Burke;  or  you  can 
read  one  of  Wordsworth's  masterpieces 
— say  the  lines  on  Tintern;  or  say,  one- 
third —  if  a  scholar,  in  the  original,  and  if 
not,  in  a  translation — of  a  book  of  the  Iliad, 
or  the  ^Eneid.  I  am  not  filling  the  half 
hour  too  full.  But  try  for  yourselves  what 
you  can  read  in  half  an  hour.  Then  mul- 
tiply the  half  hour  by  365,  and  consider 
what  treasures  you  might  have  laid  by  at 
the  end  of  the  year;  and  what  happiness, 
fortitude,  and  wisdom  they  would  have 
given  you  for  a  lifetime. 

I  will  not  take  up  your  time  by  explain- 
ing the  various  mechanical  contrivances 
and  aids  to  successful  study.  They  are 
not  to  be  despised  by  those  who  would 


OF   LITERATURE.  21 

extract  the  most  from  books.  Many  people 
think  of  knowledge  as  of  money.  They 
would  like  knowledge,  but  cannot  face  the 
perseverance  and  self-denial  that  go  to 
the  acquisition  of  it,  as  they  go  to  the 
acquisition  of  money.  The  wise  student 
will  do  most  of  his  reading  with  a  pen  or 
a  pencil  in  his  hand.  He  will  not  shrink 
from  the  useful  toil  of  making  abstracts 
and  summaries  of  what  he  is  reading.  Sir 
William  Hamilton  was  a  strong  advocate 
for  underscoring  books  of  study.  "Intelli- 
gent underlining,"  he  said,  "gave  a  kind 
of  abstract  of  an  important  work,  and  by 
the  use  of  different  colored  inks  to  mark 
a  difference  of  contents,  and  discriminate 
the  doctrinal  from  the  historical  or  illustra- 
tive elements  of  an  argument  or  exposi- 
tion, the  abstract  became  an  analysis  very 
serviceable  for  ready  reference."1  This 
assumes,  as  Hamilton  said,  that  the  book 
to  be  operated  on  is  your  own,  and  perhaps 
is  rather  too  elaborate  a  counsel  of  perfect- 
ion for  most  of  us.  Again,  some  great  men 
— Gibbon  was  one,  and  Daniel  Webster 
was  another,  and  the  great  Lord  Strafford 
was  a  third — always  before  reading  a  book 
made  a  short,  rough  analysis  of  the  ques- 
tions which  they  expected  to  be  answered  in 
it,  the  additions  to  be  made  to  their  know- 
ledge, and  whither  it  would  take  them.  I 

1  Veitch's  Life  of  Hamilton,  314,  392. 


22  ON    THE    STUDY 

have  sometimes  tried  that  way  of  steady- 
ing and  guiding  attention;  I  have  never 
done  so  without  advantage ;  and  I  commend 
it  to  you.  I  need  not  tell  you  that  you 
will  find  that  most  books  worth  reading 
once  are  worth  reading  twice,  and — what 
is  most  important  of  all — the  masterpieces 
of  literature  are  worth  reading  a  thousand 
times.  It  is  a  great  mistake  to  think  that 
because  you  have  read  a  masterpiece  once 
or  twice,  or  ten  times,  therefore  you  have 
done  with  it.  Because  it  is  a  masterpiece, 
you  ought  to  live  with  it,  and  make  it  part 
of  your  daily  life.  Another  practice  which 
I  commeud  to  you  is  that  of  keeping  a 
common-place  book,  and  transcribing  into 
it  what  is  striking  and  interesting  and 
suggestive.  And  if  you  keep  it  wisely,  as 
Locke  has  taught  us,  you  will  put  every 
entry  under  a  head,  division,  or  sub-divi- 
sion.1 This  is  an  excellent  practice  for 
concentrating  your  thought  on  the  passage 
and  making  you  alive  to  its  real  point  and 
significance. 

Various  correspondents  have  asked  me 
to  say  something  about  those  lists  of  a 
hundred  books,2  that  have  been  circulating 

1  "  If  I  would  put  anything  in  my  Common-place  Book,  I  find  out 
a  head  to  which  I  may  refer  it.  Each  head  ought  to  be  some  im- 
portant and  essential  word  to  the  matter  in  hand  "  (Locke's  Works, 
iii.  308,  ed.  1801).  This  is  for  indexing  purposes,  but  it  is  worth 
while  to  go  further  and  make  a  title  for  the  passage  extracted,  indi- 
cating its  pith  and  purport. 

*  The  subject  of  the   "  Best  Hundred  books  "   was  sharply  dis- 


OF    LITERATURE.  23 

through  the  universe  within  the  last  few 
months.  I  have  examined  some  of  these 
lists  with  considerable  care,  and  whatever 
else  may  be  said  of  them — and  I  speak  of 
them  with  great  deference  and  reserve, 
because  men  for  whom  I  have  a  great  re- 
gard have  compiled  them  —  they  do  not 
seem  to  me  to  be  calculated  either  to  create 
or  satisfy  a  wise  taste  for  literature  in  any 
very  worthy  sense.  To  fill  a  man  with  a 
hundred  parcels  of  heterogeneous  scraps 
from  the  Mahabharata,  and  \heSkeking, 
down  to  Pickwick  and  White  s  Selborne, 
may  pass  the  time,  but  I  don't  think  it 
would  strengthen  or  instruct  or  delight. 
For  instance,  it  is  a  mistake  to  think  that 
every  book  that  has  a  great  name  in  the 
history  of  books  or  of  thought  is  worth 
reading.  Some  of  the  most  famous  books 
are  least  worth  reading.  Their  fame  was 
due  to  their  doing  something  that  needed 
in  their  day  to  be  done.  The  work  done, 
the  virtue  of  the  book  expires.  Again,  I 
agree  with  those  who  say  that  the  steady 
working  down  one  of  these  lists  would  end  in 
the  manufacture  of  that  obnoxious  product 
—  the  prig.  A  prig  has  been  defined  as  an 
animal  that  is  over-fed  for  its  size.  I  think 


cussed  in  England  in  1886.  The  Pall  Mall  Gazette  [London]  took 
the  lead  in  the  discussion.  For  a  symposium  of  the  subject  see  the 
Pall  Mall  Gazette  "  Extra  "  No.  24.  See  also  Sir  John  Lubbock's 
Pleasures  of  Life  in  The  Choice  of  Books. 


ON    THE    STUDY 


that  these  bewildering  miscellanies  would 
lead  to  an  immense  quantity  of  that  kind 
of  overfeeding.  The  object  of  reading  is 
not  to  dip  into  everything  that  even  wise 
men  have  ever  written.  In  the  words  of  one 
of  the  most  winning  writers  of  English 
that  ever  existed  —  Cardinal  Newman  — 
the  object  of  literature  in  education  is  to 
open  the  mind,  to  correct  it,  to  refine  it, 
to  enable  it  to  comprehend  and  digest  its 
knowledge,  to  give  it  power  over  its  own 
faculties,  application,  flexibility,  method, 
critical  exactness,  sagacity,  address,  and 
expression.  These  are  the  objects  of  that 
intellectual  perfection  which  a  literary  ed- 
ucation is  destined  to  give.  I  will  not  ven- 
ture on  a  list  of  a  hundred  books,  but  will 
recommend  you  to  one  book  well  worthy 
of  your  attention.  Those  who  are  curious 
as  to  what  they  should  read  in  the  region 
of  pure  literature,  will  do  well  to  peruse 
my  friend  Mr.  Frederic  Harrison's  volume, 
called  the  The  Choice  of  Books.  You  will 
find  there  as  much  wise  thought,  eloquent- 
ly and  brilliantly  put,  as  in  any  volume  of 
its  size  and  on  its  subject,  whether  it  be  in 
the  list  of  a  hundred  or  not. 

Let  me  pass  to  another  topic.  We  are 
often  asked  whether  it  is  best  to  study 
subjects,  or  authors,  or  books.  Well,  I 
think  that  is  like  most  of  the  stock  ques- 
tions with  which  the  perverse  ingenuity  of 


OF    LITERATURE.  2$ 

mankind  torments  itself.  There  is  no  uni- 
versal and  exclusive  answer.  It  is  idle. 
It  was  put  to  me  that  I  should  say  some- 
thing on  it.  My  answer  is  a  very  plain 
one,  and  it  is  this.  It  is  sometimes  best  to 
study  books,  sometimes  authors,  and  some- 
times subjects;  but  at  all  times  it  is  best 
to  study  authors,  subjects,  and  books  in 
connection  with  one  another.  Whether  you 
make  your  first  approach  from  interest  in 
an  author  or  in  a  book,  the  fruit  will  be  only 
half  gathered  if  you  leave  off  without  new 
ideas  and  clearer  lights  both  on  the  man 
and  the  matter.  One  of  the  noblest  mas- 
terpieces in  the  literature  of  civil  and  polit- 
ical wisdom  is  to  be  found  in  Burke's  three 
pieces  on  the  American  War — his  speech 
on  Taxation  in  1774,  on  Conciliation  in 
1775,  and  his  letter  to  the  Sheriffs  of 
Bristol  in  I777-1  I  can  only  repeat  to  you 
what  I  have  been  saying  in  print  and  out 
of  it  for  a  good  many  years,  and  what  I 
believe  more  firmly  as  observation  is  en- 
larged by  time  and  occasion,  that  these 
three  pieces  are  the  most  perfect  manual 
in  all  literature  for  the  study  of  great 
affairs,  whether  for  the  purpose  of  know- 
ledge or  action. 

"  They  are  an  example,"  as  I  have  said 
before  now.  "  an  example  without  fault  of  all 

i  See  Burke's  Select   Works>  Vol.  i,  Edited  by  E.  J.  Payne, 
Clarendon  Press  Series. 


26  ON   THE    STUDY 

|  the  qualities  which  the  critic,  whether  a 
I  theorist  or  an  actor,  of  great  political  sit- 
uations should  strive  by  night  and  by  day  to 
possess.  If  their  subject  were  as  remote 
as  the  quarrel  between  the  Corinthians  and 
Corcyra,  or  the  war  between  Rome  and 
the  Allies,  instead  of  a  conflict  to  which 
the  world  owes  the  opportunity  of  the 
most  important  of  political  experiments, 
we  should  still  have  everything  to  learn 
from  the  author's  treatment ;  the  vigorous 
grasp  of  masses  of  compressed  detail,  the 
wide  illumination  from  great  principles  of 
human  experience,  the  strong  and  mas- 
culine feeling  for  the  two  great  political 
ends  of  Justice  and  Freedom,  the  large 
and  generous  interpretation  of  expedi- 
ency, the  morality,  the  vision,  the  noble 
temper." 

No  student  worthy  of  the  name  will 
lay  aside  these  pieces,  so  admirable  in 
their  literary  expression,  so  important  for 
history,  so  rich  in  the  lessons  of  civil 
wisdom,  until  he  has  found  out  something 
from  other  sources  as  to  the  circumstances 
from  which  such  writings  arose,  and  as  to 
the  man  whose  resplendent  genius  inspir- 
ed them.  There  are  great  personalities 
like  Burke  who  march  through  history 
with  voices  like  a  clarion  trumpet  and 
something  like  the  glitter  of  swords  in 
their  hands.  They  are  as  interesting  as 


OF    LITERATURE.  2? 

their  work.  Contact  with  them  warms 
and  kindles  the  mind.  You  will  not  be 
content,  after  reading  one  of  these  pieces 
without  knowing  the  character  and  per- 
sonality of  the  man  who  conceived  it,  and 
until  you  have  spent  an  hour  or  two  — 
and  an  hour  or  two  will  go  a  long  way 
with  Burke  still  fresh  in  your  mind — over 
other  compositions  in  political  literature, 
over  Bacon's  civil  pieces,  or  Mafchiavelli's 
Prince,  and  others  in  the  same  order  of 
thought.  That  is  my  answer  to  the  ques- 
tion whether  you  should  study  books,  sub- 
jects, or  authors.  This  points  to  the  right 
answer  to  another  question  that  is  con- 
stantly asked.  We  are  constantly  asked 
whether  desultory  reading  is  among  things 
lawful  and  permitted.  May  we  browse  at 
large  in  a  library,  as  Johnson  said,  or  is  it 
forbidden  to  open  a  book  without  a  defi- 
nite aim  and  fixed  expectations  ?  I  am 
for  a  compromise.  If  a  man  has  once  got 
his  general  point  of  view,  if  he  has  striven 
with  success  to  place  himself  at  the  cen- 
tre, what  follows  is  of  less  consequence. 
If  he  has  got  in  his  head  a  good  map  of 
the  country,  he  may  ramble  at  large  with 
impunity.  If  he  has  once  well  and  truly 
laid  the  foundations  of  a  methodical,  sys- 
tematic, habit  of  mind,  what  he  reads  will 
find  its  way  to  its  proper  place.  If  his 
intellect  is  in  good  order,  he  will  find  in 


28  ON    THE    STUDY 

every  quarter  something  to  assimilate  and 
something  that  will  nourish. 

Now  I  am  going  to  deal  with  another 
question,  with  which  perhaps  I  ought  to 
have  started.  What  is  literature  ?  It  has 
often  been  defined.  Emerson  says  it  is  a 
record  of  the  best  thoughts.  "By  litera- 
ture," says  another  author,  I  think  Mr. 
Stopford  Brooke,  "we  mean  the  written 
thoughts  and  feelings  of  intelligent  men 
and  women  arranged  in  a  way  that  shall 
give  pleasure  to  the  reader."  A  third 
account  is  that  "the  aim  of  a  student  of 
literature  is  to  know  the  best  that  has 
been  thought  in  the  world."  Definitions 
always  appear  to  me  in  these  things  to  be 
in  the  nature  of  vanity.  I  feel  that  the 
attempt  to  be  compact  in  the  definition  of 
literature,  ends  in  something  that  is  rather 
meagre,  partial,  starved,  and  unsatisfac- 
tory. I  turn  to  the  answer  given  by  a 
great  French  writer  to  a  question  not 
quite  the  same;  viz.,  "What  is  a  classic?" 
Literature  consists  of  a  whole  body  of 
classics  in  the  true  sense  of  the  word,  and 
a  classic,  as  Saint  Beauve  defines  him,  is 
an  "author  who  has  enriched  the  human 
mind,  who  has  really  added  to  its  treasure, 
who  has  got  it  to  take  a  step  farther ;  who 
has  discovered  some  unequivocal  moral 
truth,  or  penetrated  to  some  eternal  pas- 
sion, in  that  heart  of  man  where  it  seemed 


OF    LITERATURE.  2Q 

as  though  all  were  known  and  explored; 
who  has  produced  his  thought,  or  his  obser- 
vation, or  his  invention  under  some  form, 
no  matter  what,  so  it  be  great,  large, 
acute,  and  reasonable,  sane  and  beautiful 
in  itself;  who  has  spoken  to  all  in  a  style 
of  his  own,  yet  a  style  which  finds  itself  a 
style  of  everybody, — in  a  style  that  is 
at  once  new  and  antique,  and  is  the  con- 
temporary of  all  the  ages."  At  a  single 
hearing  you  may  not  take  all  that  in ;  but  if 
you  should  have  any  opportunity  of  recur- 
ring to  it  you  will  find  this  a  satisfactory, 
full,  and  instructive  account  of  what  is  a 
classic,  and  will  find  in  it  a  full  and  satis- 
factory account  of  what  those  who  have 
thought  most  on  literature  hope  to  get 
from  it,  and  most  would  desire  to  confer 
upon  others  by  it.  Literature  consists  of 
all  the  books  —  and  they  are  not  so  many 
— where  moral  truth  and  human  passion 
are  touched  with  a  certain  largeness,  san- 
ity, and  attraction  of  form.  My  notion  of 
the  literary  student  is  one  who  through 
books,  explores  the  strange  voyages  of 
man's  moral  reason,  the  impulses  of  the 
human  heart,  the  chances  and  changes 
that  have  overtaken  human  ideals  of  virtue 
and  happiness,  of  conduct  and  manners, 
and  the  shifting  fortunes  of  great  concep- 
tions of  truth  and  virtue.  Poets,  dramat- 
ists, humorists,  satirists,  masters  of  fiction, 


3O  ON    THE    STUDY 

the  great  preachers,  the  character-writers, 
the  maxim-writers,  the  great  political  ora- 

Itors  —  they  are  all  literature  in  so  far  as 
they  teach  us  to  know  man  and  to  know 
human  nature.  This  is  what  makes  litera- 
ture, rightly  sifted  and  selected,  and  right- 
ly studied,  not  the  mere  elegant  trifling 
that  it  is  so  often  and  so  erroneously  sup- 
posed to  be,  but  a  proper  instrument  for  a 

1  systematic  training  of  the  imagination  and 
sympathies,  and  of  a  genial  and  varied 
moral  sensibility. 

From  this  point  of  view  let  me  remind 
you  that  books  are  not  the  products  of 
accident  and  caprice.  As  Goethe  said,  if 
you  would  understand  an  author,  you  must 
understand  his  age.  The  same  thing  is 
just  as  true  of  a  book.  If  you  would  com- 

^j^rehend  it,  you  must  know  the  age.  There 
is  an  order ;  there  are  causes  and  relations. 
There  are  relations  between  great  composi- 
tions and  the  societies  from  which  they 
have  emerged.  I  would  put  it  in  this  way 
to  you,  that  just  as  the  naturalist  strives 
to  understand  and  to  explain  the  distribu- 
tion of  plants  and  animals  over  the  surface 
of  the  globe,  to  connect  their  presence  or 
their  absence  with  the  great  geological, 
climatic,  and  oceanic  changes,  so  the  stu- 
dent of  literature,  if  he  be  wise,  undertakes 
an  ordered  and  connected  survey  of  ideas, 
of  tastes,  of  sentiments,  of  imagination,  of 


OF    LITERATURE.  31 

humor,  of  invention,  as  they  affect  and  as 
they  are  affected  by  the  ever-changing 
experiences  of  human  nature,  and  the 
manifold  variations  that  time  and  circum- 
stances are  incessantly  working  in  human 
society. 

It  is  because  I  am  possessed,  and  desire 
to  see  others  possessed,  by  that  conception 
of  literary  study,  that  I  watch  with  the  great- 
est sympathy  and  admiration  the  efforts  of 
those  who  are  striving  so  hard,  and,  I  hope, 
so  successfully,  to  bring  the  systematic  and 
methodical  study  of  our  own  literature,  in 
connection  with  other  literatures,  among 
subjects  for  teaching  and  examination  in 
the  Universities  of  Oxford  and  Cambridge. 
I  regard  those  efforts  with  the  liveliest  in- 
terest and  sympathy.  Everybody  agrees 
that  an  educated  man  ought  to  have  a  gene- 
ral notion  of  the  course  of  the  great  out- 
ward events  of  European  history.  So,  too, 
an  educated  man  ought  to  have  a  general 
notion  of  the  course  of  all  those  inward 
thoughts  and  moods  which  find  their  ex- 
pression in  literature.  I  think  that  in 
cultivating  the  study  of  literature,  as  I 
have  rather  laboriously  endeavored  to  de- 
fine it,  you  will  be  cultivating  the  most  im- 
portant side  of  history.  Knowledge  of  it  \ 
gives  stability  and  substance  to  character.  1 
It  gives  us  a  view  of  the  ground  we  stand 
on.  It  gives  us  a  solid  backing  of  prece- 


32  ON    THE    STUDY 

dent  and  experience.  It  teaches  us  where 
we  are.  It  protects  us  against  imposture 
and  surprise. 

Before  closing,  I  should  like  to  say  one 
word  upon  the  practise  of  composition.  I 
have  suffered,  by  the  chance  of  life,  very 
much  from  the  practise  of  composition. 
It  has  been  my  lot,  I  suppose,  to  read 
more  unpublished  work  than  any  one  else 
in  this  room,  and,  I  hope,  in  this  city. 
There  is  an  idea,  and  I  venture  to  think, 
a  very  mistaken  idea,  that  you  cannot  have 
a  taste  for  literature  unless  you  are  your- 
self an  author.  I  make  bold  entirely  to 
demur  to  that  proposition.  It  is  practi- 
cally more  mischievous,  and  leads  scores 
and  even  hundreds  of  people  to  waste  their 
time  in  the  most  unprofitable  manner  that 
the  wit  of  man  can  devise,  on  work  in 
which  they  can  no  more  achieve  even  the 
most  moderate  excellence  than  they  can 
compose  a  Ninth  Symphony  or  paint  a 
Transfiguration.  It  is  a  terrible  error  to 
suppose  that  because  you  relish  "  Words- 
worth's solemn-thoughted  idyll,  or  Tenny- 
son's enchanted  reverie,"  therefore  you 
have  a  call  to  run  off  to  write  bad  verse  at 
the  Lake  or  the  Isle  of  Wight.  I  beseech 
you  not  all  to  turn  to  authorship.  I  will 
go  further.  I  venture  with  all  respect 
to  those  who  are  teachers  of  literature,  to 
doubt  the  excellence  and  utility  of  the 


OF 


OF    LITERATURE.  33 

practise  of   over-much   essay-writing   and 
composition.     I  have  very  little  faith   in 
rules  of  style,  though  I  have  an  unbounded 
faith  in  the  virtue  of  cultivating  direct  and  I 
precise  expression.     But  you  must  carry  ! 
on  the  operation  inside  the  mind,  and  not  i 
merely  by  practising  literary  deportment 
on  paper.     It  is  not  everybody  who  can 
command  the  mighty  rhythm  of  the  great- 
est masters  of  human  speech.     But  every  * 
one   can   make   reasonably  sure   that   he] 
knows  what  he  means,  and  whether  he  has! 
found  the  right  word.     These  are  internal' 
operations,  and  are  not  forwarded  by  writ- 
ing for  writing's  sake.     I  am  strong  for  at-  1 
tention  to  expression,  if  that  attention  be  I 
exercised  in  the  right  way.     It  has  been 
said  a  million  times  that  the  foundation  of 
right  expression  in  speech  or  writing  is 
sincerity.     It  is  as  true  now  as  it  has  ever  / 
been.     Right  expression  is  a  part  of  charac-  \ 
ter.     As  somebody  has  said,  by  learning  I 
to  speak  with  precision,  you  learn  to  think 
with  correctness;   and  firm  and  vigorous 
speech  lies  through  the  cultivation  of  high  j 
and  noble  sentiments.     I  think,  as  far  as 
my  observation  has  gone,  that  men  will  do 
better  for  reaching  precision  by  studying 
carefully  and  with  an  open  mind  and  a  vigi- 
lant eye  the  great  models  of  writing,  than 
by  excessive  practise  of  writing  on  their 
own  account. 


34  ON   THE    STUDY 

Much  might  here  be  said  on  what  is  one 
of  the  most  important  of  all  the  sides  of 
literary  study.  I  mean  its  effect  as  help- 
ing to  preserve  the  dignity  and  the  purity 
[  of  the  English  language.  That  noble  in- 
strument has  never  been  exposed  to  such 
dangers  as  those  which  beset  it  to-day. 
Domestic  slang,  scientific  slang,  pseudo- 
aesthetic  affectations,  hideous  importations 
from  American  newspapers,  all  bear  down 
with  horrible  force  upon  the  glorious  fabric 
which  the  genius  of  our  race  has  reared. 
I  will  say  nothing  of  my  own  on  this  press- 
ing theme,  but  will  read  to  you  a  passage 
of  weight  and  authority  from  the  greatest 
master  of  mighty  and  beautiful  speech. 

"Whoever in  a  state,"  said  Milton,  "knows  how  wisely  to  form 
the  manners  of  men  and  to  rule  them  at  home  and  in  war  with  ex- 
cellent institutes,  him  in  the  first  place,  above  others,  I  should 
esteem  worthy  of  all  honor.  But  next  to  him  the  man  who  strives 
to  establish  in  maxims  and  rules  the  method  and  habit  of  speaking 
and  writing  received  from  a  good  age  of  the  nation,  and,  as  it  were, 
to  fortify  the  same  round  with  a  kind  of  wall,  the  daring  to  over- 
leap which  let  a  law  only  short  of  that  of  Romulus  be  used  to  pre- 
vent. .  .  .  The  one,  as  I  believe,  supplies  noble  courage  and 
intrepid  counsels  against  an  enemy  invading  the  territory.  The 
other  takes  to  himself  the  task  of  extirpating  and  defeating,  by 
means  of  a  learned  detective  police  of  ears,  and  a  light  band  of  good 
authors,  that  barbarism  which  makes  large  inroads  upon  the  minds 
of  men,  and  is  a  destructive  intestine  enemy  of  genius.  Nor  is  it 
to  be  considered  of  small  consequence  what  language,  pure  or  cor- 
rupt, a  people  has,  or  what  is  their  customary  degree  of  propriety  in 
speaking  it.  ...  For,  let  the  words  of  a  country  be  in  part  un- 
handsome and  offensive  in  themselves,  in  part  debased  by  wear  and 
wrongly  uttered,  and  what  do  they  declare,  but,  by  no  light  indica- 
tion, that  the  inhabitants  of  that  country  are  an  indolent,  idly-yawn- 
ing race,  with  minds  already  long  prepared  for  any  amount  of  ser- 


OF    LITERATURE.  35 

vility  ?  On  the  other  hand,  we  have  never  heard  that  any  empire, 
any  state,  did  not  at  least  flourish  in  a  middling  degree  as  long  as  its 
own  liking  and  care  for  its  language  lasted."  * 

The  probabilities  are  that  we  are  now 
coming  to  an  epoch,  as  it  seems  to  me, 
of  a  quieter  style.  There  have  been  — 
one  of  them,  I  am  happy  to  think,  still 
survives  —  in  our  generation  three  great 
giants  of  prose  writing.  There  was,  first 
of  all,  Carlyle,  there  was  Macaulay,  and 
there  is  Mr.  Ruskin.2  These  are  all  giants, 
and  they  have  the  rights  of  giants.  But 
I  do  not  believe  that  a  greater  misfortune 
can  befall  the  students  who  attend  classes 
here,  than  that  they  should  strive  to  write 
like  any  one  of  these  three  illustrious  men. 
I  think  it  is  the  worst  thing  that  can  hap- 
pen to  them.  They  can  never  attain  to  it. 
It  is  not  everybody  who  can  bend  the  bow  , 
of  Ulysses,  and  most  men  only  do  them-  \ 
selves  a  mischief  by  trying  to  bend  it.  * 
We  are  now  on  our  way  to  a  quieter  style. 
I  am  not  sorry  for  it.  Truth  is  quiet. 
Milton's  praise  ever  lingers  in  our  minds 
as  one  of  imperishable  beauty,  —  where  he 
regrets  that  he  is  drawn  by  I  know  not 
what,  from  beholding  the  bright  counte- 
nance of  truth  in  the  quiet  and  still  air  of 
delightful  studies.  Moderation  and  judg- 

1  Letter  to  Bonmattei,  from  Florence,  1638,. 

2  The  characteristics  of  the  styles  of  Macaulay  and  Carlyle  are 
most  thoroughly  discussed  in  Minto's  "  Manual  of  English  Prose 
Literature." 


36  ON    THE    STUDY 

(ment  are  more  than  the  flash  and  the  glit- 
ter even  of  the  greatest  genius.  I  hope 
that  your  professors  of  rhetoric  will  teach 
you  to  cultivate  that  golden  art  —  the 
steadfast  use  of  a  language  in  which  truth 
can  be  told;  a  speech  that  is  strong  by 
natural  force,  and  not  merely  effective  by 
declamation;  an  utterance  without  trick, 
without  affectation,  without  mannerisms, 
and  without  any  of  that  excessive  ambi- 
tion which  overleaps  itself  as  much  in  prose 
writing  as  it  does  in  other  things. 

Now,  ladies  and  gentlemen,  I  will  detain 
you  no  longer.  I  hope  that  I  have  made 
it  clear  that  we  conceive  the  end  of  educa- 
tion on  its  literary  side  to  be  to  make  a  man 
and  not  a  cyclopaedia,  to  make  a  citizen 
and  not  a  book  of  elegant  extracts.  Litera- 
ture does  not  end  with  knowledge  of  forms, 
with  inventories  of  books  and  authors,  with 
rinding  the  key  of  rhythm,  with  the  vary- 
ing measure  of  the  stanza,  or  the  changes 
from  the  involved  and  sonorous  periods  of 
the  1 7th  century  down  to  the  staccato  of 
the  iQth  century,  or  all  the  rest  of  the 
technicalities  of  scholarship.  Do  not  think 
I  contemn  these.  They  are  all  good  things 
to  know,  but  they  are  not  ends  in  them- 
selves. The  intelligent  man,  says  Plato, 
will  prize  those  studies  which  result  in  his 
soul  getting  soberness,  righteousness,  and 
wisdom,  and  he  will  less  value  the  others. 


OF    LITERATURE.  3J 

Literature  is  one  of  the  instruments,  and 
one  of  the  most  powerful  instruments,  for 
forming  character,  for  giving  us  men  and 
women  armed  with  reason,  braced  by 
knowledge,  clothed  with  steadfastness  and 
courage,  and  inspired  by  that  public  spirit 
and  public  virtue  of  which  it  has  been  well 
said  that  they  are  the  brightest  ornaments 
of  the  mind  of  man.  Bacon  is  right,  as 
he  generally  is,  when  he  bids  us  read  not 
to  contradict  and  refute,  nor  to  believe  and 
take  for  granted,  nor  to  find  talk  and  dis- 
course, but  to  weigh  and  to  consider.  Yes, 
let  us  read  to  weigh  and  to  consider.  In 
the  times  before  us  that  promise  or  threaten 
deep  political,  economical,  and  social  con- 
troversy, what  we  need  to  do  is  to  induce 
our  people  to  weigh  and  consider.  We 
want  them  to  cultivate  energy  without  im- 
patience, activity  without  restlessness,  in- 
flexibility without  ill-humor.  I  am  not 
going  to  preach  to  you  any  artificial  stoic- 
ism. I  am  not  going  to  preach  to  you  any 
indifference  to  money,  or  to  the  pleasures 
of  social  intercourse,  or  to  the  esteem  and 
good-will  of  our  neighbors,  or  to  any  othe* 
of  the  consolations  and  the  necessities  of 
life.  But,  after  all,  the  thing  that  matters, 
most,  both  for  happiness  and  for  duty,  is 
that  we  should  habitually  live  with  wtee 
thoughts  and  right  feelings.  Literaturl 
helps  us  more  than  other  studies  to  this  most 


35         ON    THE    STUDY    OF    LITERATURE. 

blessed  companionship  of  wise  thoughts 
and  right  feelings,  and  so  I  have  taken  this 
opportunity  of  earnestly  commending  it  to 
your  interest  and  care. 


APPENDIX. 


THE  UNIVERSITY  EXTENSION  MOVEMENT. 

The  purpose  of  the  University  Extension 
Scheme  is  to  provide  the  means  of  higher  edu- 
cation for  persons  of  all  classes,  and  of  both 
sexes  engaged  in  the  regular  occupations  of 
life.  It  is  in  fact  an  attempt  to  solve  the 
problem  of  how  much  of  what  the  Universities 
do  for  their  own  students  can  be  done  for  per- 
sons unable  to  go  to  a  University.  The  fund- 
amental idea  throughout  has  been  education 
for  busy  people. 

It  originated  with  the  University  of  Cam- 
bridge. Subsequently,  three  or  four  years 
later,  the  "  London  Society  for  the  Extension 
of  University  Teaching,"  was  formed  to  carry 
on  the  work  within  the  limits  of  the  Metrop- 
olis, and  a  similar  scheme  was  undertaken  by 
Oxford.  In  addition  to  this  the  University  of 
Durham  is  associated  with  Cambridge  in  this 
work  in  Northumberland  and  Durham,  while  in 
a  tentative  and  informal  way  courses  of  lectures 
on  the  University  Extension  plan  have  been 
given  during  last  year  in  connection  with  Owen's 
College,  Manchester,  and  the  Victoria  Univer- 


40  APPENDIX. 

sity.  Proposals  are  now  being  considered  to 
form  an  inter-university  extension  scheme  in 
Scotland  in  connection  with  all  the  Scottish 
Universities  on  the  same  line  as  the  Cambridge 
scheme. 

In  the  appended  table  statistics  are  given  as 
to  the  work.  The  centres  (including  large 
towns,  small  towns,  and  even  villages  like  the 
colliery  villages  in  Northumberland)  are  asso- 
ciated into  groups  of  three  or  four,  and  a  lec- 
turer is  appointed  to  each  group  who  lives  in 
the  district  for  the  term,  and  gives  a  lecture  a 
week  at  each  of  the  centres  under  his  charge. 
It  is  only  by  such  co-operation  of  centres  that 
sufficient  work  is  secured  to  provide  adequate 
remuneration  for  lecturers. 

One  of  the  chief  characteristics  of  the  sys- 
tem is  the  method  of  teaching  adopted  in  con- 
nection with  it.  It  has  been  concisely  described 
as  follows  by  a  student  who  had  attended  the 
lectures  for  several  terms :  "  Any  town  or  vil- 
lage which  is  prepared  to  provide  an  audience, 
and  pay  the  necessary  fees,  can  secure  a  course 
of  twelve  lectures  on  any  subject  taught  in  the 
University,  by  a  lecturer  who  has  been  edu- 
cated at  the  University,  and  who  is  specially 
fitted  for  lecturing  work.  A  syllabus  of  the 
course  is  printed  and  put  into  the  hands  of 
students.  This  syllabus  is  a  great  help  to  per- 
sons not  accustomed  to  note-taking.  Questions 
are  given  on  each  lecture,  and  written  answers 
can  be  sent  in  by  any  one,  irrespective  of  age 
or  sex.  All  the  lectures,  except  the  first,  are 
preceded  by  a  class,  which  lasts  about  an  hour. 


APPENDIX.  41 

In  this  class  the  students  and  the  lecturer  talk 
over  the  previous  lecture.  The  written  answers 
are  returned  with  such  corrections  as  the  lec- 
turer deems  necessary.  At  the  end  of  the 
course  an  examination  is  held,  and  certificates 
are  awarded  to  the  successful  candidates. 
These  lectures  are  called  University  Extension 
Lectures." 

There  can  be  no  question  that  a  great  awak- 
ening of  the  intellectual  life  of  the  working 
classes  is  taking  place,  which  has  been  much 
assisted  and  fostered  in  the  north  of  England 
by  the  University  Extension  Scheme.  The 
proofs  of  this  mental  awakening  are  abundant 
and  unmistakable.  The  Northumberland  min- 
ers have  for  several  years,  under  great  diffi- 
culties, obtained  courses  of  University  lectures 
on  Political  Economy,  History,  Mining,  Geol- 
ogy, and  other  subjects.  These  courses  have 
been  given  at  twelve  mining  centres.  The  ag- 
gregate attendance  in  one  session  was  about 
1,400,  which  means  one  in  seventeen  of  the 
entire  population.  Many  of  the  students 
walked  miles  along  bad  roads,  after  dark  and 
in  all  sorts  of  weather,  in  order  to  attend  the 
lectures,  and  some  of  them  made  pecuniary 
sacrifices  in  order  to  secure  these  educational 
advantages.  Although  mention  is  made  here 
of  the  artisan  class,  the  majority  of  the  students 
who  have  attended  the  lectures  have  been  busy 
people  of  the  middle  classes,  especially  trades- 
people, clerks  and  teachers  in  schools. 


APPENDIX. 


TABLE 

Showing  the  present  position  of  the  University  Extension  Move- 
ment in  England,  the  figures  being  for  one  year  and  taken 
from  the  last  published  Reports. 


No. 

No. 

Tot.  No. 

No.Lec- 

Am't  paid 

Cen- 

Cour- 

Lectures 

turers 

to  Lecturers 

tres. 

ses. 

given. 

empl'ed. 

in  1885-86. 

iCambridge  .  .  . 
Oxford  

47 

22 

80 
2Q 

944 

19 
j-i 

£2804    42 
528  126 

London    Society 

J75 

*«5 

for  the  Extens'n 

of       University 

Teaching  .... 
In  informal  con- 

31 

60 

696 

25 

1690   95 

nection      with 

Owen's  College 
and  the  Victoria 

University  .  .  . 

5 

6 

$ 

4 

150    oo 

i°5 

175 

1863 

61 

•£5*73   6  i 

*The  University  of  Durham  is  associated  with  Cambridge  in  the 
work  in  Northumberland  and  Durham. 

The  Cambridge  and  Oxford  figures  are  for 
the  year  ending  June,  1886,  and  are  consid- 
erably larger  for  the  session  of  1886-87, 


HINTS   ON   THE   STUDY   OF 

ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

THE  INTRODUCTORY  CHAPTER  TO 


THE 


BY    HENRY   J.  NICOLL 

AUTHOR  OF  "GREAT  MOVEMENTS." 


The  time  which  most  people  are  able  to 
devote  to  literature  proper  is  very  limited  ; 
and  if  second  or  third  rate  authors  are 
read  by  them,  the  result  must  inevitably 
be  that  first-rate  authors  will  be  neglected. 
"Always  in  books  keep  the  best  company," 
wrote  Sidney  Smith  to  his  son  with  his 
usual  good  sense.  "Don't  read  a  line  of 
Ovid  till  you  have  mastered  Virgil,  nor  a 
line  of  Thomson  till  you  have  exhausted 
Pope,  nor  of  Massinger  till  you  are  familiar 
with  Shakespeare."  It  is  very  obvious  that 
those  who  read  Pollok's  "  Course  of  Time  " 
while  remaining  ignorant  of  Milton's  "  Para- 
dise Lost,"  or  the  writings  of  "A.  K.  H. 
B.,"  while  neglecting  Bacon's  "Essays" 
and  Addison's  Spectator,  are  guilty  of  a 
lamentable  waste  of  time  and  misexpendi- 
ture  of  energy.  "  If  you  should  transfer 
the  amount  of  your  reading  day  by  day," 


44  HINTS    ON    THE    STUDY    OF 

says  Emerson,  "from  the  newspapers  to 
the  standard  authors  —  but  who  dare  speak 
of  such  a  thing?"  To  expect  people  to 
give  up  newspaper-reading  is  certainly  a 
very  Utopian  speculation,  nor  indeed,  is  it 
desirable  in  many  respects  that  they  should 
give  it  up.  But  it  is  a  very  easy  and  practi- 
cal thing  to  obey  the  rule  to  study  the  best 
authors  first,  for  it  may  be  safely  laid  down 
as  a  general  principle  that  the  greatest 
works  of  our  literature  are  also  the  most 
attractive.  No  dramatist  is  so  readable  as 
Shakespeare;  to  no  works  of  fiction  can 
we  return  again  and  again  with  greater 
pleasure  than  to  the  masterpieces  of  Field- 
ing and  Scott ;  nowhere  can  the  blood- 
stained story  of  the  French  Revolution  be 
followed  with  keener  interest  than  in  the 
pages  of  Carlyle. 

Literature  is  a  word  often  so  loosely 
applied,  that  it  may  be  well  at  the  outset 
to  define  exactly  what  we  mean  by  it.  By 
people  in  general  it  is  used  with  a  very 
wide  range  of  meaning.  Milton's  "  Para- 
dise Lost "  and  Buchan's  "  Domestic  Medi- 
cine;" Rhymer's  "Foedera"  and  Macau- 
lay's  "  History  of  England,"  are  ranked 
under  the  same  all-embracing  name.  But 
literature  rightly  so  termed  is  a  word  of 
much  narrower  signification.  To  entitle 
anything  to  be  classed  as  literature,  it  must 
be  so  written  that,  apart  from  the  mean- 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  45 

ing  conveyed,  its  mere  style  shall  be  such 
as  to  give  pleasure.  Neither  wealth  of  in- 
formation nor  depth  of  thought  gives  a 
work  a  right  to  be  called  literature  unless 
the  information  and  the  thought  be  attrac- 
tively expressed.  From  this  it  is  clear 
that  many  books,  otherwise  of  great  merit, 
have  no  claim  to  consideration  in  a  literary 
history.  A  plan  of  a  country  may  have 
more  practical  utility  than  the  most  beauti- 
ful landscape  ever  painted,  but  as  it  lacks 
the  essential  element  of  beauty,  it  will  not 
be  placed  in  the  same  category.  In  like 
manner  many  books  which  we  could  very 
ill  afford  to  dispense  with,  being  destitute 
of  attractiveness  and  distinction  of  style, 
have  no  value  viewed  merely  as  literature. 
The  true  literary  man  is  an  artist,  using 
his  words  and  phrases  with  the  same  felicity 
and  care  as  a  painter  uses  his  colors  ;  andj 
whoever  aspires  to  win  literary  fame 
pay  the  closest  attention  not  only  to  whc 
he  says,  but  to  how  he  says  it. 

De  Quincey,  whose  speculations  on  such 
subjects  are  always  ingenious  and  worth 
attending  to,  if  sometimes  over-refined  and 
far-fetched,  in  one  of  his  essays 1  lays  down 
a  distinction,  first  suggested  by  Words- 
worth, which  bears  upon  what  we  have 
been  saying.  As  De  Quincey's  critical 

1  Originally  published  in  North  British  Review  for  August,  1848, 
article  on  Pope. 


46  HINTS    ON   THE    STUDY    OF 

writings  are  not  so  generally  read  as  they 
should  be,  we  may  quote  part  of  his  remarks, 
"  In  that  great  social  organ,  which  colleo 
tively  we  call  literature,  there  may  be  dis- 
tinguished two  separate  offices,  that  may 
blend,  and  often  do  so,  but  capable  severally 
of  a  severe  insulation,  and  naturally  fitted 
for  reciprocal  repulsion.  There  is  first  the 
literature  of  knowledge,  and  secondly  the 
literature  of  power.  The  function  of  the 
first  is  to  teach, ;  the  function  of  the  second 
is  to  move.  The  first  is  a  rudder,  the 
second  an  oar  or  a  sail.  The  first  speaks 
to  the  mere  discursive  understanding ;  the 
second  speaks  ultimately,  it  may  happen, 
to  the  higher  understanding  or  reason,  but 
always  through  affections  of  pleasures  or 
sympathy.  .  .  .  What  do  you  learn  from 
•  Paradise  Lost  ? '  Nothing  at  all.  What 
do  you  learn  from  a  cookery-book  ?  Some- 
thing new,  something  that  you  did  not 
know  before,  in  every  paragraph.  But 
would  you  therefore  put  the  wretched 
cookery-book  on  a  higher  level  of  estima- 
tion than  the  divine  poem  ?  What  you 
owe  to  Milton  is  not  any  knowledge,  of 
which  a  million  separate  items  are  still  but 
a  million  of  advancing  steps  on  the  same 
earthly  level ;  what  you  owe  is  powert  that 
is,  exercise  and  expansion  to  your  own 
latent  capacity  of  sympathy  with  the  infi- 
nite, when  every  pulse  and  each  separate 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  47 

influx  is  a  step  upwards  —  a  step  ascending 
as  from  a  Jacob's  ladder  from  earth  to 
mysterious  altitudes  above  the  earth.  .  .  . 
All  the  literature  of  knowledge  builds  only 
ground  fiests,  that  are  swept  away  by  floods, 
or  confounded  by  the  plough ;  but  the 
literature  of  power  builds  nests  in  aerial 
altitudes  of  temples  sacred  from  violation, 
or  of  forests  inaccessible  to  fraud.  This 
is  a  great  perogative  of  \hzpower  of  litera- 
ture ;  and  it  is  a  greater  which  lies  in  the 
mode  of  its  influence.  The  knowledge  of 
literature,  like  the  fashion  of  this  world, 
passeth  away.  An  Encyclopaedia  is  its 
abstract ;  and,  in  this  respect,  it  may  be 
taken  for  its  speaking  symbol,  that  before 
one  generation  has  passed,  an  Encyclopae- 
dia is  superannuated,  for  it  speaks  through 
the  dead  memory  and  unimpassioned  under- 
standing, which  have  not  the  rest  of  higher 
faculties,  but  are  continually  enlarging  and 
varying  their  phylacteries." 

In  the  preceding  extracts,  as  will  be  seen, 
De  Quincey  uses  the  phrase  "  literature  of 
knowledge"  to  express  that  class  of  writ- 
ings to  which  the  term  literature  cannot, 
as  he  himself  afterwards  says,  be  with 
propriety  applied  —  writings  the  sole  aim 
of  which  is  to  convey  information  without 
any  effort  after  beauty  of  style ;  and  the 
phrase  " literature  of  power"  to  express 
that  class  of  writings — fiction  and  poetry 


48  HINTS    ON    THE    STUDY   OF 

—  of  which  the  object  is,  not  to  instruct, 
but  to  move  the  feelings  and  to  give  pleas- 
ure, and  of  which,  therefore,  attractiveness 
of  style  is  an  essential  characteristic.  But, 
as  he  himself  says  in  a  note,  a  great  propor- 
tion of  books  —  history,  biography,  travels, 
miscellaneous  essays,  etc.  — belong  strictly 
to  neither  of  these  two  classes.  Macaulay's 
"  History  of  England "  contains  a  vast 
amount  of  information,  but  it  is  not  its 
stores  of  information  which  have  attracted 
to  it  millions  of  readers ;  it  is  the  fasci- 
nating style  in  which  the  information  is 
conveyed,  making  the  narrative  as  pleasing 
as  a  novel,  and  giving  some  passages  a 
power  of  exciting  the  emotions  which  not 
many  poems  possess.  And  though  to  in- 
struct be  not  the  prime  function  of  the 
novel  or  the  poem,  a  great  fund  of  instruc- 
tion as  to  morals  and  manners  is  embodied 
in  almost  all  good  poems  and  novels. 
Shakespeare  abounds  in  pithy  aphorisms  as 
to  the  conduct  of  life,  which  have  become 
part  of  the  moralist's  stock-in-trade  ;  Scott, 
in  the  " Heart  of  Midlothian"  (to  give 
only  one  example  out  of  many),  preaches 
a  very  effective  homily  on  the  evil  conse- 
quences of  giving  up  inward  peace  of  mind 
for  the  sake  of  outward  grandeur ;  and  such 
writers  as  Thackeray  and  Miss  Austen 
have  done  much  to  make  people  ashamed 
of  angularities  and  affectations  of  manner. 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  49 

So  that  De  Quincey's  distinction,  though 
true  in  a  wide  sense,  and  very  suggestive 
in  many  ways,  is  not  to  be  accepted  as 
absolutely  correct.  All  literature  worthy 
of  the  name  is  "literature  of  power,"  but 
it  may  be,  and  very  often  is,  "  literature  of 
knowledge"  also. 

Having  defined  what  literature  is,  wei 
now  proceed  to  consider  the  way  in  which 
its  study  may  be  most  profitably  pursued. 
In  order  fully  to  comprehend  any  author's 
work,  and  to  place  him  in  his  true  position 
among  his  fellows,  not  only  must  his  writ- 
ings be  studied  with  due  care,  but  he  must 
pay  regard  to  his  outward  "environment" 
and  to  the  circumstances  of  the  times  in 
which  he  lived.  Sainte  Beuve,  the  prince 
of  French  critics,  in  all  his  inquiries  made 
it  a  rule  before  studying  the  author  to  study 
the  man,  thinking  that  "  as  the  tree  is  so 
will  be  the  fruit."  He  was  of  opinion 
"  that  so  long  as  you  have  not  asked  your- 
self a  certain  number  of  questions  and 
answered  them  satisfactorily  —  if  only  for 
your  own  private  benefit  and  sotto  voce  — 
you  cannot  be  sure  of  thoroughly  under- 
standing your  model,  and  that  even  though 
these  questions  may  seem  to  be  quite 
foreign  to  the  nature  of  his  writings.  For 
instance,  what  were  his  religious  views  ? 
how  did  the  sight  of  nature  affect  him  ? 
what  was  he  in  his  dealings  with  women 


5O  HINTS    ON    THE    STDUY    OF 

and  in  his  feelings  respecting  money? 
was  he  rich,  was  he  poor  ?  what  was  his 
regimen  ?  what  was  his  daily  manner  of 
life  ?  etc.  Finally,  to  what  vice  was  he 
addicted  or  to  what  weakness  subject  ? 
for  no  man  is  entirely  free  from  such. 
There  is  not  one  of  the  answers  to  these 
questions  that  is  without  its  value  in  judg- 
ing the  author  of  a  book,  or  even  the  book 
itself,  if  it  be  not  a  treatise  on  pure  mathe- 
matics, but  a  literary  work  into  the  com- 
position of  which  some  of  the  writer's 
whole  nature  has  perforce  entered."  The 
practise  which  now  prevails  of  publishing 
full  and  authentic  memoirs  of  celebrities, 
if  perhaps  not  unobjectionable  in  some  re- 
spects, is  certainly  an  incalculable  gain  to 
the  fruitful  and  intelligent  study  of  litera- 
ture. If  we  were  so  fortunate  as  to  find  a 
Life  of  Shakespeare  similar  to  that  which 
Boswell  wrote  of  Dr.  Johnson,  can  any  one 
doubt  that  it  would  throw,  an  immense 
light  upon  the  many  literary  puzzles  which 
are  to  be  found  in  his  writings,  and  which 
have  perplexed  generations  of  commen- 
tators and  evoked  hundreds  of  volumes  ? 
How  many  ingenious  and  elaborate  studies 
on  "  Hamlet "  would  be  shown  to  be  as  the 
baseless  fabric  of  a  vision?  how  many 
passages  which  verbal  critics  have  (as  they 
thought)  proved  to  demonstration  not  to 
have  come  from  Shakespeare's  pen  would 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  5  I 

be  claimed  as  his  ?  how,  perchance,  every 
one*  of  the  theories  about  the  Sonnets 
would  crumble  into  dust,  never  again  to 
be  mentioned  but  with  laughter  after  their 
mystery  had  been  unveiled  by  unimpeach- 
able evidence  ? 

Again,  to  take  a  case  from  our  own  time, 
how  would  we  explain  the  gloomy  pessim- 
ism of  the  latter  writings  of  Carlyle  as  con- 
trasted with  the  sanguine  optimism  of 
Macaulay  if  no  records  of  his  life  were  to 
be  found,  and  we  were  compelled  to  judge 
of  him  by  his  works  alone  ?  Carlyle's  tem- 
perament, no  doubt,  was  naturally  gloomy, 
but  that  fact  alone  would  not  be  a  sufficient 
solution  of  the  enigma.  But  when  we 
study  the  story  of  his  life,  and  learn  how 
he  was  constantly  tormented  by  ill-health  ; 
how,  eagerly  ambitious  of  literary  fame, 
he  had  to  toil  on  for  many  a  long  year  un- 
noticed and  unknown,  with  bitter  experi- 
ence of  that  deferred  hope  which  makes  the 
heart  sick ;  how,  when  the  day  of  triumph 
came,  it  came  so  late  that  the  flower  of 
success  had  well-nigh  lost  its  fragrance — 
then  we  have  no  difficulty  in  understanding 
the  cause  of  his  frequently  dark  and  harsh 
views  of  human  character  and  destiny. 
We  need  hardly  dwell  on  the  additional 
interest  given  to  a  book  by  a  knowledge  of 
the  circumstances  under  which  it  was  com- 
posed. Byron's  poetry  owes  half  its  attrac- 


52  HINTS    ON    THE    STUDY    OF 

tiveness  to  the  fascination  exercised  by  his 
singular  and  strongly  marked  personality. 
Johnson's  works,  excellent  though  some 
of  them  are,  would  now,  we  imagine,  be 
very  little  read  if  Boswell's  Life  of  him 
had  not  made  him  one  of  the  best  known, 
and  (with  all  his  eccentricities)  one  of  the 
best-loved  characters  in  our  literary  his- 
tory. One's  interest  even  in  such  a  book 
as  Gibbon's  "Decline  and  Fall"  is  per- 
ceptibly quickened  by  the  full  and  curious 
portrait  of  himself  which  he  has  drawn  in 
his  Autobiography. 

But  for  the  thorough  and  profitable  study 
of  an  author,  it  is  not  enough  that  we  know 
the  circumstances  of  his  private  history; 
we  must  also  make  ourselves  acquainted 
with  the  period  in  which  his  lot  was  cast. 
No  writer,  however  great  and  original  his 
genius,  can  escape  the  influence  of  the 
spirit  of  the  age  in  which  he  lives  ;  whether 
with  or  without  his  consent,  his  way  of 
looking  at  things  will  be  modified  by  the 
intellectual  atmosphere  by  which  he  is  sur- 
rounded. Literary  men  alike  influence 
and  are  influenced  by  their  time ;  and  as 
no  history  of  a  country  can  be  considered 
complete  which  ignores  the  influence  ex- 
erted by  its  literature,  so  any  literary  his- 
tory which  ignores  the  currents  of  thought 
and  opinion  set  afloat  by  political  move- 
ments must  necessarily  be  partial  and 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  53 

inadequate.  There  is  no  greater  desider- 
atum in  our  literature  at  present  than  a 
complete  and  able  account  of  the  history 
of  English  literature,  in  which  the  con- 
nection between  the  literary  and  political 
history  of  our  country  shall  be  fully  dealt 
with  ;  and  it  is  very  much  to  be  desired 
that  some  one  of  'sufficient  talents  and 
acquirements  may  be  induced  to  under- 
take the  task.  He  will  have  compara- 
tively unbeaten  ground  to  deal  with.  M. 
Taine,  indeed,  in  his  "  History  of  English 
Literature,"  has  done  something  in  this 
direction ;  but  his  erratic  brilliancy  is  not 
to  be  implicity  relied  upon.1  In  periods 
of  great  national  emotion,  the  influence  ex- 
erted on  literature  by  the  powerful  currents 
of  thought  and  action  sweeping  on  around 
it  is  so  strong  and  so  manifest  that  it  can- 
not escape  the  notice  of  the  most  careless 
observer.  The  mighty  burst  of  song  in 
England  during  the  reign  of  Elizabeth,  a 
time  of  great  men  and  great  deeds,  when 
new  ideas  and  new  influences  were  power- 
fully at  work  among  all  sections  of  society, 
has  often  been  commented  on.  The  im- 
purity and  heartlessness  of  the  drama  of 

1  NOTE  BY  AUTHOR.—  It  is  not  to  the  credit  of  England  that  the 
only  full  survey  of  its  literature  possessing  any  high  merit  from  a 
purely  literary  point  of  view  should  be  the  work  of  a  Frenchman. 
We  have  among  us  not  a  few  writers,  any  one  of  whom,  if  they 
would  abandon  for  a  few  years  the  practice,  now  unhappily  too 
prevalent,  of  writing  merely  Review  articles  and  brief  monographs, 
could  produce  a  work  on  the  subject  worthy  of  so  great  a  theme. 


54  HINTS    ON    THE    STUDY    OF 

the  Restoration  was  a  true  type  of  the 
nation's  wild  outburst  of  revelry  after  its 
escape  from  the  austere  chains  of  Puritan- 
ism. Not  so  strikingly  apparent,  yet  very 
noticeable,  is  the  connection  between  the 
tortuous  and  shifty  politics  of  the  early 
years  of  the  eighteenth  century  and  the 
absence  from  the  literature  of  that  period 
of  any  high  ideal  or  elevating  principle. 
Coming  nearer  our  own  time,  all  are  aware 
that  the  revolutionary  movement  of  the 
close  of  the  last  century  was  active  not 
only  in  politics  but  in  letters ;  that  as  old 
laws  and  old  principles  were  found  inade- 
quate to  the  needs  of  the  time,  so  the 
literary  forms  and  rules  of  the  preceding 
generation  were  cast  to  the  winds  as  quite 
incapable  of  expressing  the  novel  ideas  and 
imaginations  of  a  race  of  writers  who  pos- 
sessed little  or  nothing  in  common  with 
their  predecessors.  But  even  in  quieter 
times,  when  the  broad  river  of  national 
life  is  unruffled  by  violent  storms,  careful 
inquiry  will  make  it  apparent  that  its  in- 
fluence upon  literature  is  very  close  and 
very  real. 

The  most  useful  commentary  on  a  great 
writer  is  to  be  found  in  the  works  of  his 
contemporaries.  It  is  mainly  the  service 
which  they  render  in  this  direction  that 
prevents  one  from  agreeing  with  Emerson 
when  he  says  that  perhaps  the  human 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  55 

mind  would  be  a  gainer  if  all  secondary 
writers  were  lost.  From  an  author's  con- 
temporaries we  may  learn  what  ideas  in 
his  time  were,  to  use  Dr.  Newman's 
phrase,  "  in  the  air,"  and  thus  be  able  to 
gauge  with  some  degree  of  accuracy  the 
extent  of  his  originality.  We  have  all 
been  taught  that  Shakespeare  far  outshone 
any  of  the  brilliant  constellations  of  dra- 
matic stars  which  adorned  the  reign  of 
Elizabeth  ;  but  this  is  only  a  barren  phrase 
to  us  till  we  have  studied  the  other  dra- 
matists of  his  time,  and  are  thus  in  a 
position  to  realise  what  it  really  means. 
The  writings  of  contemporaries,  moreover, 
often  help  us  to  account  for  the  flaws  and 
deficiencies  which  not  unfrequently  occur 
even  in  authors  of  the  highest  class,  by 
giving  us  a  clue  to  the  literary  fashions 
which  prevailed  in  their  time.  Shake- 
speare's tendency  to  indulge  in  puns  and 
verbal  quibbles,  which  mars  some  of  his 
finest  passages,  was,  no  doubt,  due  not  so 
much  to  any  natural  inclination  as  because 
he  lived  in  an  age  extravagantly  fond  of 
such  ingenuities  ;  and  even  he,  immeasur- 
ably great  man  as  he  was,  proved  unable 
to  resist  the  contagion  which  spread  every- 
where around  him.  In  this  connection  we 
should  not  omit  to  notice  the  valuable  aid 
which  writers  destitute  of  original  power, 
but  with  a  faculty  for  assimilating  the 


56  HINTS    ON    THE    STUDY    OF 

ideas  and  imitating  the  style  of  others, 
often  afford  to  the  study  of  those  whose 
voices  they  echo.  Every  great  writer, 
while  his  popularity  is  at  its  height,  is  sur- 
rounded by  a  crowd  of  imitators,  who  copy 
in  an  exaggerated  fashion  his  peculiar 
mannerism,  and  thus  afford  a  very  ready 
means  of  observing  the  minute  traits  of  its 
style,  and  its  little  weaknesses  and  affecta- 
tions, which  might  otherwise  escape  our 
notice.  If  imitation  be  the  sincerest  form 
of  flattery,  it  is  often  also  the  bitterest 
satire.  The  severest  critics  of  Mr.  Tenny- 
son and  Mr.  Swinburne  have  not  so  ac- 
curately shown  the  imperfections  in  the 
work  of  these  writers,  nor  have  they,  it  is 
probable,  caused  them  so  much  pain  as  the 
verses  of  certain  minor  singers  of  our  day 
have  done.  No  parody  is  at  once  so 
scathing  and  so  ridiculous  as  an  attempt 
made  by  a  writer  of  feeble  powers  to  emu- 
late the  productions  of  a  man  of  genius. 

If  ten  men  of  literary  culture  were 
asked  to  write  down  the  names  of  the 
thirty  English  writers  (exclusive  of  authors 
of  our  own  time)  who  are  their  greatest 
favorites,  of  whom  they  make  as  it  were 
companions  and  friends,  the  lists,  we  may 
be  sure,  would  differ  widely.  But  if  these 
ten  men  were  asked  to  write  down  the  names 
of  the  thirty  English  writers  who  occupy 
the  highest  rank,  who  are  accepted  as  the 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  $? 

best  representatives  of  our  literature,  the 
lists  would  probably  resemble  each  other 
very  closely.  In  the  former  case,  single 
lists  would  contain  names  which  were  found 
in  none  of  the  others ;  in  the  latter  case, 
it  is  very  unlikely  that  any  list  would  con- 
tain a  name  which  was  not  also  mentioned 
in  several.  "If  I  were  confined  to  a  score 
of  English  books,"  said  Southey,  "Sir 
Thomas  Browne  would,  I  think,  be  one  of 
them  ;  nay,  probably  it  would  be  one  if  the 
selection  were  cut  down  to  twelve.  My 
library,  if  reduced  to  these  bounds,  would 
consist  of  Shakespeare,  Chaucer,  Spenser, 
and  Milton ;  Jackson,  Jeremy  Taylor,  and 
South;  Isaac  Walton,  Sidney's  "Arcadia," 
Fuller's  "  Church  History,"  and  Sir  Thomas 
Browne ; l  "  and  what  a  wealthy  and  well- 
stored  mind  would  that  man  have,  what  an 
inexhaustible  reservoir,  what  a  Bank  of  Eng- 
land to  draw  upon  for  profitable  thoughts 
and  delightful  associations,  who  should  have 
fed  upon  them."  Some  of  the  names  in 
the  above  list  will  strike  the  reader  as  curi- 
ous. Jackson,  South,  and  even  Fuller's 
"Church  History"  and  Sydney's  "Arca- 
dia "  are  not  books  which  can  be  ranked 
among  general  favorites.  But  Southey 
found  in  them  the  mental  food  best  adapt- 
ed to  his  constitution,  and  therefore  pre- 

1  Doubtless  from  inadvertence,  Southey  mentions  only  eleven  wri. 
ters.    Who  the  twelfth  was,  affords  matter  for  curious  speculation.          .  / 


58  HINTS    ON   THE   STUDY   OF 

f erred  them  to  others  of  greater  intrinsic 
merit  and  much  wider  popularity.  In  books, 
as  in  other  things,  tastes  differ  very  much. 
Not  a  few,  whether  they  are  honest  enough 
to  confess  it  or  not,  agree  with  worthy 
George  III.  in  thinking  that  Shakespeare 
often  wrote  "sad  stuff;"  some  people,  by 
no  means  deficient  in  abilities,  can  read 
"  Pickwick  "  without  a  laugh  or  even  a 
smile;  Macaulay,  Mr.  Trevelyan  tells  us, 
was  so  disgusted  with  the  unconventional 
style  of  Ruskin  and  Carlyle  that  he  refused 
even  to  look  at  their  works. 

It  is,  therefore,  not  at  all  surprising  that 
when  a  young  reader  takes  up  a  book  which, 
he  has  heard,  is  enrolled  in  the  list  of  Eng- 
lish classics,  he  should  not  unfrequently 
find  little  in  it  to  please  him,  and  thus  be 
tempted  to  think  that  it  has  been  overrated. 
But  if,  as  in  the  case  we  suppose,  the  book 
is  one  which  has  stood  the  test  of  time,  he 
may  be  sure  he  is  wrong.  "  Nature,"  writes 
Emerson  "is  much  our  friend  in  this  matter. 
Nature  is  always  clarifying  her  water  and 
her  wine ;  no  filtration  can  be  so  perfect. 
She  does  the  same  thing  by  books  as  by  her 
gases  and  plants.  There  is  always  a  selec- 
tion in  writers,  and  then  a  selection  from 
the  selection.  In  the  first  place,  all  books 
that  get  fairly  into  the  open  air  of  the  world 
were  written  by  the  successful  class,  by  the 
affirming  and  advancing  class,  who  utter 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  59 

what  tens  of  thousands  feel  though  they 
cannot  say.  There  has  already  been  a 
scrutiny  and  choice  from  many  hundreds 
of  young  pens  before  the  pamphlet  or  polit- 
ical chapter  which  you  read  in  a  fugitive 
journal  comes  to  your  eye.  All  these  are 
young  adventurers,  who  produce  their  per- 
formances to  the  wise  ear  of  Time,  who  sits 
and  weighs,  and  ten  years  hence  out  of  a 
million  of  pages  reprints  one.  Again  it  is 
judged,  it  is  winnowed  by  all  the  winds  of 
opinion — and  what  terrific  selection  has 
not  passed  on  it  before  it  can  be  reprinted 
after  twenty  years — and  reprinted  after  a 
century !  It  is  as  if  Minos  and  Rhadaman, 
thus  had  indorsed  the  writing.  'Tis  there- 
fore an  economy  of  time  to  read  old  and 
famed  books.  Nothing  can  be  preserved 
which  is  not  good/'  We  might  almost  add 
that  whatever  has  not  been  preserved  is 
not  good.  Those  whose  duty  or  inclination 
leads  them  to  wander  in  literary  bypaths 
sometimes  come  across  forgotten  writers 
in  whom  they  find  a  certain  tone  of  manner 
or  feeling  which  gives  them,  in  their  eyes, 
more  attractiveness  than  is  possessed  by 
writers  whose  praises  are  echoed  by  thou- 
sands. But  all  attempts  to  resuscitate 
such  books  fail  as  utterly  as  attempts  to 
lower  the  position  of  books  which  have 
been  accepted  as  classical.  The  opinion 
of  the  majority  of  readers  during  many 


6O  HINTS    ON    THE    STUDY   OF 

years  is  better  than  that  of  any  individual 
reader,  or  any  small  coterie  of  readers,  how- 
ever high  their  gifts  or  attainments  may  be. 
It  often  happens  that  wider  knowledge 
and  culture  leads  one  who  at  first  was  un- 
able to  recognize  the  merits  of  a  classical 
author  to  see  his  error  and  acquiesce  in 
the  general  verdict.  In  the  case  of  our 
older  authors,  there  are  preliminary  diffi- 
culties of  style  and  language,  which  must, 
at  the  cost  of  some  trouble,  be  vanquished 
before  they  can  be  read  with  pleasure.  The 
practice  of  "dipping  into"  an  author  and 
reading  bits  here  and  there  is  productive 
of  a  great  deal  of  literary  heterodoxy.  It 
is,  for  example,  a  not  uncommon  remark 
that  articles,  of  which  the  writers  are 
never  heard  of,  but  which  are  as  good  as 
any  in  the  Spectator  or  Tatler,  appear  in 
our  newspapers  every  day.  No  doubt 
there  is  a  very  large  amount  of  talent  now 
employed  in  newspaper-writing ;  neverthe- 
less our  average  journalists  are  not  Steeles 
or  Addisons.  The  reason,  in  most  cases, 
why  newspaper  articles  are  thought  equal 
to  the  Spectator  is  because  the  former  deal 
with  living  subjects,  subjects  which  are 
interesting  people  at  the  moment,  while 
the  latter,  having  been  written  more  than 
a  century  and  a  half  ago,  has  an  antique 
flavor  about  it.  The  Spectator  cannot  be 
appreciated  but  by  those  who,  not  content 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  6l 

with  dipping  into  it  here  and  there,  have 
read  at  least  a  considerable  portion  of  it, 
and  thus  gained  such  a  knowledge  of  the 
manners  and  opinions  which  prevailed  when 
it  was  written,  as  to  be  able  to  enter  into 
the  spirit  of  the  work.  A  newspaper 
article  referring  to  matters  occupying  the 
minds  of  all,  may  be  perused  with  pleasure 
without  any  preparation. 

But  though  increased  knowledge  and 
wider  culture  generally  leads  one  to  ac- 
quiesce in  received  opinions  regarding  the 
value  of  authors,  they  do  not  always  do  so. 
Every  critic,  however  large  his  range  and 
however  keen  his  discernment,  occasionally 
meets  in  with  works  of  great  fame  of  which 
he  cannot  appreciate  the  merit.  He  may, 
indeed,  be  able  to  perceive  the  qualities 
which  cause  others  to  admire  them,  but 
they  are  written  in  a  vein  which  he  cannot 
bring  himself  to  like :  the  tone  of  senti- 
ment running  through  them,  or  the  style 
in  which  they  are  written,  is  repugnant  to 
his  nature.  The  fact  that  this  is  so,  gener- 
ally leads-to  a  plentiful  indulgence  in  what 
Mr.  James  Payn  has  so  happily  christened 
"sham  admiration  in  literature."  People 
praise  botiks  which  they  have  never  been 
able  to  read,  or  which  they  have  only 'read 
at  the  cost  of  much  labor  and  weariness, 
not  because  they  like  them  themselves, 
but  simply  because  they  have  heard  others 


62  HINTS    ON    THE    STUDY    OF 

praise  them.  It  is  melancholly  to  reflect 
how  much  of  our  current  criticism  upon 
classical  authors  is  of  this  nature,  consist- 
ing of  mere  windy  rhetoric,  not  of  the  un- 
biassed and  honest  expression  of  the  critic's 
real  opinions.  The  practice  is  both  an 
unprofitable  and  a  dishonest  one.  Much 
more  is  to  be  learned  from  the  genuine 
opinions  of  an  able  man,  even  though  these 
opinions  be  erroneous,  than  from  the  repeti- 
tion of  conventional  critical  dicta.  John- 
son's "Lives  of  the  Poets"  contain  many 
incorrect  critical  judgments;  but  does  any 
one  suppose  that  the  work  would  have 
been  of  more  value  if,  instead  of  relating 
in  manly  and  straightforward  fashion  the 
opinions  of  his  own  powerful,  if  somewhat 
narrow,  understanding,  he  had  merely  re 
peated  the  "  orthodox  "  criticisms  on  such 
writers  as  Milton  and  Gray  ?  Even  Jeffrey's 
articles  on  Wordsworth — those  standing  ex- 
amples of  blundering  criticism  —  are  much 
more  useful  and  interesting  to  the  intelli- 
gent reader  than  the  thrice-repeated  lau- 
datory criticisms  which  are  now  so  often 
uttered  by  countless  insincere  devotees 
of  the  poet  of  the  Lakes.  Every  student 
of  literature  should  make  an  honest  effort 
to  form  opinions  for  himself,  and  not  take 
up  too  much  with  borrowed  criticism. 
Critical  essays,  books  of  literary  history, 
books  of  select  extracts,  are  all  very  use- 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  63 

ful  as  aids  to  the  study  of  great  writers,  but 
they  ought  not,  as  is  too  often  the  case, 
to  be  made  a  substitute  for  the  study  of 
the  writers  themselves.  Infinitely  more 
is  to  be  learned  from  the  reading  of  "  Ham- 
let," than  from  the  reading  of  a  hundred 
studies  on  that  drama.  If,  after  having 
made  a  fair  attempt  to  peruse  some  author 
whose  works  are  in  high  repute,  the  reader 
finds  that  he  is  engaged  in  a  field  of  litera- 
ture which  presents  no  attraction  to  him  ; 
that  he  is  studying  a  writer  with  whom  he 
has  no  sympathy,  who  strikes  no  respond- 
ent chord  in  his  own  nature ;  the  best 
course  for  him  is  to  abandon  the  vain  at- 
tempt to  like  what  he  does  not  like,  to 
admire  what  he  really  does  not  admire. 
Shakespeare's  famous  lines  — 

"  No  profit  goes  where  is  no  pleasure  ta'en, 
In  brief,  sir,  study  what  you  most  affect,"  — 

convey  thoroughly  sound  advice,  provided, 
of  course,  that  proper  pains  be  taken  to 
extend  one's  culture  as  widely  as  possible, 
and  that  opinions  regarding  the  profitable- 
ness or  unprofitableness  of  studying  cer- 
tain authors  be  not  formed  without  due 
deliberation.  In  the  study  of  literature, 
as  in  other  studies,  interest  advances 
as  knowledge  increases ;  very  frequently 
books  which  to  the  tyro  seem  "weary, 
stale,  flat,  and  unprofitable,"  are  those 
which  he  afterwards  comes  to  regard  as 


64  HINTS    ON    THE    STUDY    OF 

among  his  most  cherished  intellectual  pos- 
sessions. 

A  very  attractive  and  instructive  way  of 
studying  literature,  is  to  select  some  great 
book  or  some  great  author  as  a  nucleus 
round  which  to  group  one's  knowledge  of 
the  writers  of  a  period.  If,  for  example, 
one  studies  that  universally  delightful  book, 
BoswelPs  "  Life  of  Johnson,"  and  follows 
up  the  clues  which  its  perusal  suggests,  a 
very  competent  knowledge  of  a  large  part 
of  the  literature  of  the  eighteenth  century 
may  be  acquired.  Boswell's  frequent  cut- 
ting allusions  to  his  rival,  Sir  John  Haw- 
kins, naturally  induce  us  to  read  that 
worthy's  Life  of  the  "great  lexicographer," 
in  which,  amid  much  trash  and  tedious 
moralizing,  many  curious  and  suggestive 
details  are  to  be  found.  In  a  similar  way 
his  obvious  dislike  of  Mrs.  Piozzi  draws 
attention  to  that  lively  lady's  entertain- 
ing gossip ;  while  the  glimpses  he  gives  of 
the  life  and  conversation  of  most  of  the 
celebrated  writers  of  the  period,  such  as 
Burke,  Goldsmith,  Robertson,  Hume,  in- 
spire us  with  a  desire  to  become  acquainted 
with  their  writings  and  with  the  particu- 
lars of  their  lives.  Or  if  Pope  be  taken 
as  the  vantage-ground  from  which  to  sur- 
vey the  literary  landscape  around,  how 
easily  and  pleasantly  are  we  introduced  to 
the  acquaintance,  not  only  of  the  greater 


ENGLISH  LITERATURE.  65 

figures  of  the  time, — Addison,  Swift,  Bo- 
lingbroke,  Arbuthnot,  and  others,  —  but 
of  the  smaller  fry,  the  ragged  denizens  of 
Grub  Street,  so  mercilessly  satirized  in 
the  "  Dunciad."  No  one  can  know  Dry- 
den  thoroughly  without  picking  up,  almost 
imperceptibly  it  may  be,  an  immense  fund 
of  information  about  the  many  curious 
literary  products  of  the  Restoration ;  and 
few  more  interesting  literary  studies  could 
be  suggested  than,  taking  Shakespeare  as 
a  centre,  to  mark  wherein  he  differed  from 
his  predecessors  and  contemporaries,  how 
far  he  availed  himself  of  what  they  had 
done,  how  far  he  influenced  them,  and  how 
far  he  was  influenced  by  them,  and  to  trace 
the  whole  course  of  the  Elizabethan  drama 
from  its  first  dim  drawings  to  its  melan- 
choly but  not  inglorious  close.  When  one 
has  made  oneself  at  home  in  the  literature 
of  any  period,  so  as  to  be  able  to  conjure 
up  before  the  mind's  eye  its  more  import- 
ant writers,  even  its  minutest  details,  which 
in  themselves  seem  trifling  and  tedious, 
acquire  an  interest  and  importance,  every 
fresh  particular  adding  a  new  shade  of 
color  to  the  mental  picture  we  form  of  the 
epoch. 

Literary  history  becomes  much  more  in- 
teresting to  most  people  the  nearer  it  ap- 
proaches to  our  own  time ;  and  very  few 
are  likely  to  acquire  a  taste  for  reading 


66  HINTS    ON    THE    STUDY    OF 

by  having  their  attention  directed  mainly 
to  our  older  authors.  Now,  what  every 
writer  of  a  book  like  the  present  and  every 
teacher  of  English  literature  ought  to  aim 
at  is,  to  give  his  readers  or  his  pupils  a 
taste  for  literature.  If  the  teacher  of 
English  literature  fails  in  this,  his  labors 
are  almost  in  vain.  The  amount  of  knowl- 
edge which  he  is  able  to  communicate  is 
comparatively  small;  but  if  he  manages 
to  impress  on  his  pupils  a  sense  of  the 
greatness  and  importance  of  literature, 
and  of  the  countless  benefits  and  pleasures 
which  may  be  derived  from  its  study,  he 
has  sown  the  seeds  of  what  will  yet  pro- 
duce a  very  abundant  harvest.  The  re- 
mark is  very  often  made  that  young  people 
are  of  their  own  accord  likely  to  peruse 
writers  of  the  day,  while  leaving  the  classi- 
cal writers  of  former  generations  neglected. 
No  doubt  there  is  a  good  deal  of  truth  in 
this :  but  I  am  disposed  to  question  very 
much  whether  the  practice  of  using  mainly 
our  older  writers  for  educational  purposes 
has  any  appreciable  effects  whatever  in 
extending  their  general  perusal ;  and  when 
one  considers  how  literature  —  even  liter- 
ature of  the  day  —  is  neglected  by  num- 
bers of  educated  people,  one  is  inclined  to 
have  some  doubt  as  to  the  wisdom  of  leav- 
ing recent  writers  out  of  the  educational 
curriculum.  Few  will  be  disposed  to  deny 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  6? 

that  the  most  important  section  of  political 
history  is  that  which  relates  to  recent  times. 
To  a  large  extent,  the  same  is  true  of  litera- 
ture. Nothing  is  more  likely  to  quicken 
one's  interest  in  books,  and  to  serve  as  an 
incentive  to  further  research,  than  an  ac- 
quaintance with  the  various  literary  modes 
that  have  been  prevalent  in  recent  times 
or  which  are  still  in  vogue.  Moreover,  if 
the  study  of  English  literature  is  pursued 
partly  as  a  means  of  acquiring  a  correct  style, 
there  can  be  no  doubt  whatever  that  the 
prose  writers  of  the  last  two  centuries 
will  prove  much  more  useful  guides  than 
their  predecessors.  The  following  interest- 
ing remarks  on  this  subject,  quoted  from  a 
lecture  "On Teaching  English,"1  recently 
delivered  by  Dr.  Alexander  Bain  before 
the  Birmingham  Teachers'  Association, 
appear  to  me  to  have  much  force,  though 
the  views  expressed  are  perhaps  rather 
extreme.  "Irrespective  of  a.ny  question 
as  to  the  superiority  of  Shakespeare  and 
Milton,  it  must  from  necessity  be  the  case 
that  the  recent  classics  possess  the  great- 
est amount  of  unexhausted  interest.  Their 
authors  have  studied  and  been  guided  by 
the  greatest  works  of  the  past,  have  re- 

1  This  lecture  with  other  matter  has  been  incorporated  into  a  re- 
cent volume  by  Professor  Bain,  called  "On  Teaching  English," 
with  detailed  examples,  and  an  inquiry  into  the  definition  of  poetry. 
This  work  is  auxiliary  to  the  enlarged  edition  of  the  author's  "  Rhet- 
oric and  English  Composition." 


68  HINTS    ON    THE    STUDY   OF 

produced  many  of  their  effects,  as  well  as 
added  new  strokes  of  genius ;  and  thus 
our  reading  is  naturally  directed  to  them 
by  preference.  A  canto  of  '  Childe  Har- 
old' has  not  the  genius  of  '  Macbeth/ 
or  the  second  book  of  *  Paradise  Lost,' 
but  it  has  more  freshness  of  interest. 
This  is  as  regards  the  reader  of  mature 
years,  but  it  must  be  taken  into  account 
in  the  case  of  the  youthful  reader  also. 

"So  with  regard  to  the  older  prose. 
The  'Essays'  of  Bacon  cannot  interest 
this  generation  in  any  proportion  to  the 
author's  transcendent  genius.  They  have 
passed  into  subsequent  literature  until 
their  interest  is  exhausted,  except  from 
the  occasional  quiet  felicity  of  the  phrases. 
Bacon's  maxims  on  the  conduct  of  busi- 
ness are  completely  superseded  by  Sir 
Arthur  Helps's  essay  on  that  subject,  sim- 
ply because  Sir  Arthur  absorbed  all  that 
was  in  Bacon,  and  augumented  it  by  sub- 
sequent wisdom  and  experience.  To  make 
Bacon's  original  a  text-book  of  the  pres- 
ent day,  whether  for  thought  or  for  style, 
is  to  abolish  the  three  intervening  centu- 
ries. 

"Of  Richard  Hooker's  « Ecclesiastical 
Polity/  another  literary  monument  of  the 
Elizabethan  age,  while  I  give  it  every 
credit  as  a  work  suited  to  its  own  time,  I 
am  obliged  to  concur  in  the  judgment  of 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE.  69 

an  authority  great  both  in  Jurisprudence 
and  in  English  style  —  the  late  John  Austin 
—  who  denounced  its  language  as  '  fustian.' 
"  So  much  as  regards  the  decay  of  in- 
terest in  the  old  classics.  Next  as  to  their 
use  in  teaching  style  or  in  exercising  pupils 
in  the  practice  of  good  composition.  Here, 
too,  I  think,  they  labor  under  incurable 
defects.  Their  language  is  not  our  lan- 
guage ;  their  best  expressions  are  valuable 
as  having  the  stamp  of  genius,  and  are 
quotable  to  all  time,  but  we  cannot  work 
them  into  the  tissue  of  our  own  familiar 
discourse." 


71 


THE   STUDY   OF 

ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

A    LECTURE 

DELIVERED   TO   THE  STUDENTS'  ASSOCIATION  OF 
ST.  ANDREWS,  MARCH  26,    1887 

BY     LESLIE     STEPHEN1 


I  AM  to  speak  of  a  well-worn  topic,  and 
I  begin  by  saying  that  I  do  not  propose  to 
dwell  upon  one  of  its  aspects.  I  shall  not 
consider  the  proper  place  of  English  litera- 
ture in  our  school  and  university  studies. 
My  reason  is  simply  that  I  have  not  the 
practical  experience  which  would  enable 
me  to  pass  beyond  the  ordinary  common- 
places. I  have  more  prejudices  than  rea- 
soned convictions  on  that  subject.  I  take 
for  granted,  indeed,  as  an  undeniable  propo- 
sition, that  familiarity  with  our  literature 
is  desirable.  It  is  desirable  for  us  all  to 
have  the  personal  acquaintance  of  men 

'Leslie  Stephen,  the  well-known  English  author  and  lecturer,  was 
born  in  1832,  and  educated  at  Cambridge.  He  was  editor  of 
the  Cornhill  Magazine  from  1871  to  1882.  He  is  now  engaged  in 
editing  the  "  Dictionary  of  National  Biography,"  a  most  thorough 
and  comprehensive  work  in  fifty  volumes.  Mr.  Stephen  is  well- 
known  by  his  "  Hours  in  a  Library"  (3  series),  "  Life  of  Henry  Faw- 
cett,"  and  several  volumes  in  the  "  English  Men  of  Letters  series." 


72  THE   STUDY    OF 

better,  wiser,  more  highly  endowed  than 
ourselves.  Acquaintance  with  such  men 
is  not  less  desirable  after  their  death.  In 
some  respects  it  is  even  more  desirable. 
The  dead  man  cannot,  it  is  true,  answer 
our  questions  or  thrill  us  by  his  bodily 
presence ;  but  neither  can  he  alarm  our 
modesty  or  repel  us  by  accidental  infirmi- 
ties. If  we  could  consciously  meet  a 
Shakespeare,  we  should  be  struck  dumb ; 
but  we  are  quite  at  our  ease  with  that 
essence  of  Shakespeare  which  is  com- 
pressed into  a  book.  We  can  put  him  in 
our  pockets,  admit  him  to  an  audience 
when  we  are  in  the  humor,  and  treat  him 
as  familiarly  as  a  college  chum.  We  can 
meet  Dr.  Johnson  without  the  least  fear 
that  he  will  be  personally  rude,  and  stop 
Macaulay's  excessive  flow  of  information 
by  simply  shutting  up  his  pages.  The  man 
may  be  only  unfortunate  who,  in  his  youth, 
has  not  been  stimulated  by  the  personal 
acquaintance  of  some  revered  contempo- 
rary. He  is  more  than  unfortunate,  he  is 
blameworthy,  if  he  do  not  make  the  ac- 
quaintance of  some  of  the  great  men  from 
Chaucer  to  Lord  Tennyson,  from  Bacon 
to  Carlyle,  who  speak  to  us  across  the  gulf 
of  time  or  from  regions  inaccessible  to  us 
in  person. 

The  true  object  of  the  study  of  a  man's 
writings  is,  according  to  my  definition,  to 

^o-^w*J'"»^^BB*U6*«^»**!*'*I1«»^ 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  73 

make   a   personal    friend   of    the   author. 
You  have  not  studied  him  thoroughly  tilP\ 
you  know  the  very  trick  of  his  speech,  the     j 
turn   of   his   thoughts,  the   characteristic     / 
peculiarities  of  his  sentiments,  of  his  im-    f 
agery,  of  his  mode  of  contemplating  the    / 
world  or  human  life.     You  should  breathe 
a  familiar  atmosphere  when  you  open  his/ 
pages.     If  you  meet  a  stray  phrase  of  his^ 
it  should  ring  in  your  ears  with  the  accent 
of  an   old   acquaintance;   you    should   be 
able  to  swear  to  it  as  a  part  of  his  coinage. 
You   should   "have   learnt  his  great  lan- 
guage, caught  his  clear  accents,  made  him 
your  pattern  to  live  and  to  die,"  and,  1  wil] 
venture  to  add,  you  should  then  have  pass- 
ed beyond  this  stage  of  idolatry  —  which 
is  good  as  a  phase,  but  bad  as  a  permanent 
state   of    mind — into    that   of    sane    and 
reasonable  appreciation.     Addison,  in  an  \ 
often  quoted  passage,  ridicules  the  reader  7 
who  wants  to  know  whether  his  author  is  j 
short  or  tall,  black  or  fair.     Perhaps  such 
a  demand  is  excessive ;  but  I  do  not  feel 
that  I  really  know  an  author  till  I  almost 
fancy  that  I  should  recognize  him  if  I  met 
him   at  a  railway    station.     That    indeed 
proves  that  I  know  very  few;  but  it  marks 
what  is  my  own  ideal.     How,  then,  to  at- 
tain such  knowledge  ?  I  begin  by  replying, 
that  before  reaching  the  root  of  the  matter 
there  are  certain  auxiliary  studies  which 


74  THE    STUDY    OF 

are  obviously  necessary  and  yet  obviously 
external.  They  give  the  key,  they  do  not 
lead  us  into  the  sanctuary,  For  example, 
one  necessary  preliminary  is  to  learn  our 
letters.  But  a  bare  power  of  reading  does 
not  take  us  very  far.  That  part  of  our 
education  was  probably  completed  in  our 
nurseries.  In  our  nurseries  also  we  gener- 
ally suppose  ourselves  to  have  learnt  the 
English  language.  Now  it  is  thought 
superfluous  to  insist  upon  a  study  of  the 
alphabet,  but  a  good  deal  is  said  of  the  im- 
portance of  that  scientific  study  of  lan- 
guage which  acquires  the  more  sounding 
title,  philology.  For  the  study  of  a  for- 
eign literature  it  is,  of  course,  indispens- 
ably necessary  to  learn  the  language,  and 
generally  at  a  comparatively  late  period. 

But  for  the  study  of  English  literature 
the  question  occurs  whether  we  may  not 
be  presumed  to  have  learnt  more  from  our 
nurses  than  we  shall  ever  acquire  from 
our  teachers.  Philology  is,  of  course,  a 
most  important  and  interesting  study.  An 
investigation  of  the  great  instrument  of 
thought  and  of  its  processes  of  develop- 
ment has  a  genuine  interest  for  philoso- 
phers, logicians,  and  even  for  historians 
and  antiquarians,  as  well  as  for  literary 
students.  Philologists  have  to  study  the 
same  documents  as  men  of  letters.  They 
have  to  read  Chaucer  and  Shakespeare, 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE.  75 

though  with  a  very  different  purpose.  So 
a  chemist  may  study  a  picture  as  well  as 
an  art  critic.  The  main  interest  of  the 
one  is  in  the  pigments  to  which  it  owes  its 
color,  as  the  main  interest  of  the  other  is 
in  the  effect  upon  the  imagination  of  a 
particular  combination  of  colors.  The  phil- 
ologist, as  such,  can  tell  you  the  history 
of  a  word  used  by  Shakespeare,  but  as  a 
philologist  he  has  nothing  to  do  with  the 
imaginative  force  of  the  sentence  in  which 
the  word  occurs.  So  far  as  the  language 
is  obsolete,  so  far  as  it  has  become  a  dead 
language,  he  can  do  something  for  you. 
He  can  supplement  the  instruction  which, 
as  to  the  great  bulk  of  the  language,  was 
already  given  in  your  nursery.  Here  and 
there  he  clears  away  an  obscurity  or  points 
some  allusion  no  longer  manifest;  and  we 
will,  if  you  please,  be  duly  thankful  to  him, 
and  tell  him  that  he  has  rendered  us  a  real 
service.  But,  however  valuable  for  other 
purposes,  we  must  admit  that  he  is  not  a 
guide  to  the  kind  of  knowledge  which  we 
desire,  but  an  humble  attendant  who  has 
cleared  a  few  stumbling-blocks  from  our 
path. 

There   are   other   studies   which  make 
greater  claims,  and  of  which  I  must  speak 
more  fully.  ^J  Literature   is   made   up   of~ 
words.     It  is  a  combination   of   raw  ma- 
terials which   are  all  to  be  found  in  the 


76  THE    STUDY    OF 

dictionary.  But  it  is,  as  we  know,  a  com- 
bination governed  by  peculiar  laws  of  its 
own.  To  study  those  laws  scientifically 
must,  therefore,  it  is  urged,  be  an  essen- 
tial aim  of  the  literary  student.  The  his- 
torical method  is  now  in  the  ascendant. 
It  affects  not  only  history  in  the  old  sense, 
but  philosophy,  political  and  social  theory, 
and  every  other  branch  of  inquiry  which 
has  to  do  with  the  development  of  living 
beings.  No  one  would  assert  this  more 
emphatically  than  I  should  do.  'One  corol- 
"/lary  is  that  we  should  study  the  history  of 
our  own  literature,  that  we  should  not  only 
trace  it  back  to  its  origin  in  our  own  islands, 
but  also  to  the  great  foreign  literatures 
which  have  had  so  profound  an  influence 
upon  our  own.  Especially,  it  is  urged,  no 
one  can  appreciate  English  literature  with- 
out a  knowledge  of  classical  literature. 
You  cannot,  says  one  authority,  fully  esti- 
mate Chaucer  unless  you  are  familiar  with 
Virgil,  Statius,  and  Ovid. 

No  one,  says  Mark  Pattison,  can  follow 
Milton  fully  unless  he  has  had  at  least  a 
taste  of  Milton's  training;  that  is,  some 
knowledge  of  the  authors  whom  Milton, 
we  may  not  say  plundered,  but  turned  to 
account  in  every  page  of  his  poetry.  The 
statement  is  not  only  plausible,  but  owes 
its  plausibility  to  the  fact  that  it  contains 
a  most  important  truth.  Undoubtedly  the 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE. 


sympathetic  study  of  ancient  master-pieces 
is  a  most  admirable  training  for  the  liter- 
ary student.  Really  to  appropriate  the 
great  writers  of  Greece  or  Rome  is  to 
acquire  a  valuable  possession.  It  is  a  great 
thing  to  know  how  the  real  masters  take 
hold  of  a  subject,  in  order  to  feel  the  vast 
difference  between  the  great  creative  gen- 
ius and  the  mere  man  of  talent.  The  great 
classical  works  have  an  advantage  not  only 
as  being  recognized  masterpieces,  but  as 
being  foreign.  To  know  them  is  to  recog- 
nize genius  amongst  unfamiliar  shapes  and 
surroundings.  As  an  hour  in  Calais  will 
put  more  fresh  knowledge  into  your  minds 
than  a  month  in  London,  simply  by  mak- 
ing you  realize  that  there  are  countries 
where  babies  talk  French,  so  excursions 
into  the  wide  expanse, 

Which  deep-browed  Homer  ruled  for  his  demesne, 

enables  you  to  get  rid  of  insular  prejudices. 
It  is  a  training  in  the  art  of  recognizing\ 
the  essential  quality  of  genius  apart  from  I 
the  local  and  temporary  accidents  which 
go  so  far  to  determine  our  taste  in  ordinary 
cases.  I  would  emphatically  assert  the 
advantages  of  classical  study  —  if  any  one 
disputed  it  —  all  the  more  ungrudgingly, 
I  hope,  because  my  own  acquaintance  with 
the  classics  is  limited.  But  I  shall  not  be 
therefore  deterred  from  observing  that 
even  this  study  may  be  so  conducted  as  to 


?  THE   STUDY   OF 

degenerate  into  mere  cram.  The  average 
schoolboy  gains  little  when  he  holds  Latin 
to  be  an  instrument  of  torture  invented 
by  some  prehistoric  Keate  or  Busby,  and 
is  painfully  drilled  into  construing  arma, 
the  arms ;  virumque,  and  the  man ;  cano, 
I  sing.  Nay,  such  men  have  been  ob- 
served as  the  more  scholarlike  pedant  who 
can  unravel  every  crabbed  passage  in  the 
most  corrupt  fragment  of  a  Greek  play, 
but  has  only  learnt,  like  Thackeray's  Bar- 
dolph,  to  despise  everybody  who  can't  put 
a  slang  song  into  Greek  iambics  or  turn  a 
police  report  into  the  language  of  Thucy- 
dides. 

I  have  known  many  classical  scholars, 
of  whom  I  can  safely  say  that  they  excite 
my  envy,  because  I  can  perceive  how  much 
their  taste  in  modern  has  been  refined 
and  elevated  by  their  study  of  ancient 
literature.  But  I  have  also,  to  be  quite 
frank,  known  one  or  two  who  have  only 
become  better  trained  schoolboys,  and 
have  become  more  finical  and  pedantic 
without  any  perceptible  improvement  of 
their  powers  of  appreciating  literature. 
From  which  I  only  infer  that  it  is  possible 
even  to  learn  Latin  and  Greek  in  a  sense 
—  in  such  a  sense  as  to  be  a  formidable 
competitor  in  an  examination,  and  yet  to 
gain  a  very  poor  training  indeed.  Such  a 
man  acquires  something.  He  has  the 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  /9 

power  of  explaining  allusions  or  produc- 
ing parallel  passages.  He  can  track  Mil- 
ton in  his  appropriations,  or  say  how  many 
Greek  poets  have  anticipated  Gray's  re- 
mark about  the  rose  which  wastes  its 
sweetness  in  the  desert  air.  It  is  not  only 
amusing  but  instructive  to  hunt  out  the 
curious  coincidences  of  thought  or  phrase 
in  great  poets,  or  to  see  how  a  great  writer 
mades  his  own  of  what  he  borrows.  But 
the  power  of  answering  one  of  the  stock 
examiners'  questions,  "explain  the  allu- 
sions in  this  passage,"  is  consistent  with/ 
complete  insensibility  to  the  merits  of  botlj 
passages.  How  far  does  such  knowledge 
really  aid  your  appreciation  ?  Opening 
Milton  at  random,  I  find  that  the  passage 
describing  Satan, 

His  spear,  to  equal  which  the  tallest  pine 
Hewn  on  Norwegian  hills  to  be  the  mast 
Of  some  great  ammiral,  were  but  a  wand, 

may  imply  recollections  of  the  "  Odyssey," 
of  the  "  ^Eneid,"  and  of  Tasso.  The  com- 
mentator is  also  good  enough  to  tell  us 
that  there  are  many  pines  in  Norway. 
Does  the  passage  sound  any  the  better  or 
the  worse?  Pattison  told  us  that  only 
those  classically  trained  could  follow  Mil- 
ton. It  is  only  such  persons,  I  fully  agree, 
who  catch  the  full  Miltonic  aroma.  But  if 
I  were  asked  to  name  some  one  whose  soul 
would  really  ring  like  an  echo  to  the  ma- 
jestic language  of  the  great  Puritan,  I 


8O  THE    STUDY   OF 

think  that  my  mind,  and  the  minds  of  a 
good  many  of  us,  would  spontaneously  re- 
cur to  the  name  of  one  who  has  told  us 
that  he  knows  little  Latin  and  no  Greek 
—  I  mean  Mr.  John  Bright.  He  cannot, 
he  says  very  frankly,  and  it  is  a  misfortune 
for  him,  appreciate  Plato.  But  that  de- 
fect is  clearly  compatible  with  unequalled 
mastery  of  some  of  the  noblest  strains  of 
English  eloquence,  and  it  would  be  in- 
credible that  a  man  who  can  use  the  in- 
strument so  skilfully  should  not  appreciate 
its  use  by  others. 

When,  indeed,  I  am  told  that  a  knowl- 
edge of  classical  literature  is  not  only  most 
desirable,  but  even  essential  to  a  full  ap- 
preciation of  the  modern  literatures,  I 
cannot  but  think  that  there  is  a  gap  in  the 
logic.  How  do  you  learn  to  appreciate 
either?  I  know  a  lady  of  remarkable 
beauty ;  I  am  told  and  I  believe  that  she 
inherits  the  beauty  from  her  grandmother. 
Do  you  imagine  that  I  enjoy  the  sight  of 
her  beauty  the  less  because  I  had  not  the 
happiness  to  know  her  grandmother?  The 
knowledge  of  the  fact  is  interesting  to  me 
as  an  humble  disciple  of  Mr  Darwin  ;  it  is 
a  case  of  "  heredity,"  and  therefore  relev- 
ant to  a  scientific  inquiry.  Similarly,  if  I 
wish  to  explain  how  English  literature 
comes  to  have  certain  peculiarities,  I  must 
know  the  sources  from  which  it  is  derived. 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  8 1 

But  after  all  there  is  a  vast  difference  be- 
tween what    is    called  knowing  a  thing's 
history  and  really  knowing  the  thing   it- 
self,  between    really   having   an   ear  for 
music    and    knowing   how,    for   example, 
modern  harmony  has  grown  out  of  strum- 
ming on  some  prehistoric  barbarous  torn- 
torn.     No  amount  of  such  knowledge  wilT\ 
give  you  the  ear ;  nor  will  any  knowledge  of  \ 
the  relations  between  English  and  classi->  \ 
cal  literature  of  itself  endow  you  with  the/ 
true  faculty  for  perceiving  the  beauties  of  J 
either.     We  cannot  honestly  deny  the  fact- 
that   many  of  our   greatest  writers  owed 
little  or  nothing  to  any  classical  training, 
even  when  they  possessed  it.    It  is  enough 
to  run  over  the   bare   names  of   Shakes- 
peare and  Bunyan  and  Defoe  and  Burns 
and  Dickens,  to  say  nothing  of  many  less 
distinguished.     Cobbett   wrote  incompar- 
ably better   English   than  Dr.  Parr,  and 
Mr.  Bright  has  a  style  very  superior  to  — ^__ 
I  will  not  give  a  name.     Criticism  requires 
a   wider   knowledge    though    less    genius 
than    original   authorship;   but   I    cannot 
discover  that  our  finest  critic  of  some  of 
the  most  important  English  literature — 
I  mean  Charles  Lamb  —  owed  anything  to 
his  scanty  scholarship. 

Admitting,  then,  most  heartily  the  great 
value    of    a   genuine    study   of    classical  t\ 
literature,  I  yet   am    forced   to  regard  it  | 


^ 

THE    STUDY    OF 
t 

rather  as  one  of  the  studies  by  which  our 
tastes  may  be  improved  and  our  percep- 
I  tions  refined  than  as  an  indespensable 
'  mode  of  training.  There  is  one  other 
kind  of  study  upon  which  I  may  spend  a 
word  or  two.  Recent  critics,  I  observe, 
are  fond  of  dwelling  upon  what  they  call 
the  "  form "  as  distinguished  from  the 
"content"  of  poetry,  and  are  given  to  insist 
that  the  important  question  is  not  what 
a  man  says,  but  how  he  says  it.  I  will  not 
diverge  into  a  discussion  of  this  state- 
ment, which  like  many  others  may,  as  I 
hold,  be  true  and  important,  or  very  much 
the  reverse  according  to  our  interpreta- 
tion of  its  precise  meaning.  I  will  only 
note  that,  on  one  acceptation,  it  amounts 
to  recommending  the  most  barren  and 
Wechanical  study  as  the  only  genuine 
study. /You  are,  it  is  sometimes  suggested, 
to  study  a  poet's  metres  and  neglect  his 
meaning.  The  difference  between  succes- 
sive schools  of  poetry  is  not  in  the  senti- 
ments which  they  express,  but  in  the 
mechanism  by  which  they  contrive  to  ex- 
press them.  And  thus  a  literary  revolu- 
tion is  explained  like  a  revolution  in  the 
practical  sciences.  Somebody  invented  a 
new  scheme  of  versification  as  somebody 
invented  a  new  application  of  steam  or 
electricity.  To  which  I  shall  only  say 
that  the  metrical  systems  and  so  forth 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  83 

which  appear  in  different  periods  are  un- 
doubtedly worth  study,  and  here,  as  every- 
where, so  far  as  the  knowledge  is  use- 
ful, we  should  be  careful  to  have  accurate 
knowledge.  But  it  is  a  palpable  mistake, 
as  I  think,  to  speak  of  such  changes  as  a 
cause  instead  of  a  symptom.  If  Pope  pre- 
ferred a  smooth  and  monotonous  system 
of  verse  to  the  rougher  but  more  varied 
versification  of  his  predecessors,  the  fact 
is  to  be  noted,  but  not  to  be  assigned  as 
an  explanation.  The  system  of  Pope  was" 
not  due  to  an  invention  of  ten-syllabled 
couplets,  as  the  change  in  weaving  was 
due  to  Arkwright's  invention  of  the  spinn- 
ing-machine. It  came  when  it  was  wanted. 
It  was  wanted  when  anew  order  of  thoughts 
and  feelings  had  to  be  expressed.  The 
new  order  of  thought  and  feeling  was  not 
created  by  the  new  mechanism,  but  deter- 
mined its  adoption.  The  literary  revolu- 
tion, to  which  we  give  the  name  of  Words- 
worth or  Coleridge,  was  no  more  caused 
by  the  invention  of  a  new  literary  fashion 
than  the  great  political  revolution  by  the 
abandonment  of  wigs  and  laced  coats. 
Wigs  and  laced  coats  went  with  other 
things  of  more  importance  as  men's  social 
and  political  and  religious  instincts  under- 
went a  change  ;  and  the  minor  change,  too, 
is  worth  noting  as  a  symptom.  But  to 
treat  the  symptom  as  the  cause,  or  to  sup- 


84  THE    STUDY   OF 

pose  that  the  external  changes  can  be 
studied  to  any  purpose  without  reference 
^o  the  underlying  causes  to  which  they 
were  due,  is  to  miss  the  whole  significance 
of  literary  or  any  other  kind  of  history^J^ 

And   this   leads   to   a   further   inquiry. 

here  are  we  to  look  for  ±Jie  real  signifi- 
ce  of  such  changes  ?<OLiterature  may 
be  considered  in  two  waysT~A  book  is  the 
utterance  of  an  individual  mind^  It  is  the 
sic  cogitavit  of  a  Francis  Bacon,  a  Wil- 
liam Shakespeare,  or  an  Alexander  Pope. 
But  it  does  not  depend  simply  upon  the 
individual  mind.  /Every  individual  is  a 
constituent  part  of  a  society.  He  trans- 
mutes as  well  as  creates.  He  utters  his 
own  thoughts,  but  he  is  also  the  organ 
through  which  the  spirit  of  the,  age  utters 
its  thoughts.^  He  looks  upon  the  world, 
but  he  is  a13o,  in  part  at  least,  a  product 
of  its  development.  His  philosophy,  the 
enthusiasms  which  stir  him,  the  doubts 
which  torment  him,  the  answers  which  he 
supplies  to  them,  the  form  in  which  he 
states  the  eternal  problems  and  tries  to 
utter  a  solution,  are  all  in  great  measure 
determined  for  him  by  the  social  element 
in  which  he  lives.  This  has  become  a 
commonplace.  No  one  would  now  think 
that  Shakespeare  could  be  criticised  fully 
without  some  knowledge  of  Elizabeth's 
time,  or  Pope  without  a  knowledge  of 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  85 

Annie's  time,  or  Byron  without  a  knowl- 
edge of  the  Revolutionary  time.      Litera- 
ture in  this  aspect  is  simply  one  function 
of  the  social  organism  —  if  you  will  allow 
me  to  use  the  philosophical  slang  of  the 
day — and   any   serious    treatment    of    it 
must    recognize   the   fact.     The   greatest- 
men,  it  is  true,  say  what  is  of  interest  for 
all  times ;  but  even  the  very  greatest,  the 
Homers  and  Dantes  and  Shakespeares,  say- 
it  in  the  dialect  and  under  all  the  condi- 
tions of  their  own  time.  *-+. 
So  far  then  as  the  study  of  literature  n 
can  be  —  I  will  not  say  made  truly  scien-     K 
tine,  for  it  is  idle  to  speak  of  science  in  re- 
lation  to  the  vague  and    tentative  judg-     ') 
ments  which  alone  are  possible  now,  but     j| 
—  treated   in  a  scientific    spirit,    that   is, 
examined   impartially  and   placed  in  due 
correlation  with  all  the  truths  known  to  us, 
it  is  essential  to  understand  in  some  de-      I 
gree  the  time  as  well  as  the  man,  because  I    \ 
only  through  the  time  can  we  fully  under- 1 
stand  the  man.     In  this  sense  the  special  I 
studies  which  I  have  mentioned  are  all  in 
various  degrees  relevant ;  they  are  useful 
auxiliary   studies:    the   study  V   the  Iftn- 
guage.  "jjjig  f"r™g  of  gvprgggjn^,  of  the 
previous  literatures  which  have  influenced 
our  own,  all  call  attention  either  to  the 
symptoms  or  to  the~  causes,  of  Important 
facts  which  we  have^ta  take  into  account.  , 


86  THE    STUDY    OF 

But  I  think  that  we  can  see  the  import- 
ance of  another  kind  of  study  still  more 
intimately  connected  with  our  aims.  Let 
me  try  to  show  how,  as  I  conceive,  it  may 
be  of  real  assistance,  even  at  the  price  of 
repeating  some  very  familiar  truths.  You 
should,  I  say,  understand  the  spirit  of  the 
age,  and  by  that  I  do  not  mean  that  you 
should  study  what  is  called  the  philosophy 
of  history.  There  is,  indeed,  no  more 
fascinating  study;  but,  in  the  first  place, 
the  doctrines  which  it  announces  are  still 
the  guesses  of  clever  men  rather  than  the 
established  conclusions  of  scientific  ob- 
servers ;  and,  in  the  next  place,  true  or 
false,  they  are  abstract  theories,  not  con- 
crete pictures.  What  you  require  is  not 
a  clever  analysis,  but  a  vivid  representation 
of  the  period.  You  should  see  it,  not  be 
full  of  formula  about  it.  An  architect 
upon  glancing  at  an  old  building  can  tell 
you  to  what  century  or  to  what  generation 
it  belongs.  When  you  turn  over  a  book 
you  should  possess  the  instinct  which  en- 
ables you  to  give  a  shrewd  guess  as  to 
whether,  for  example,  it  was  written  be- 
fore or  after  1760,  in  the  days  of  George 
II.  or  of  George  III. 

If,  now,  you  were  studying  the  period 
of  which  Dry  den  was  the  literary  auto- 
crat, I  believe  that  few  bits  of  reading 
would  give  you  more  real  help  than  that 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  8/ 

admirable  third  chapter  of  Macaulay's  \ 
history  which  with  all  its  faults,  gives  the  ! 
most  graphic  and  picturesque  account  of  I 
English  society  at  the  time.  Or,  if  you  } 
go  to  contemporary  documents,  nothing 
would  enable  you  to  construct  such  a 
picture  for  yourself  as  the  diaries  of  Pepys 
or  the  memoirs  of  Grammont ;  or,  if  I  may 
mention  a  favorite  book  of  my  own,  the 
volumes  of  the  State  trials  which  deal 
with  that  period.  Nothing  enables  you  to 
see  so  clearly  the  various  heterogeneous 
elements  of  which  society  was  then  com- 
posed, and  to  understand  what  was  the 
audience  whose  tastes  Dryden  considered 
in  every  line  that  he  wrote,  the  great 
seminal  thoughts  which  were  then  ferment- 
ing and  struggling  for  utterance,  and  the 
imagery  which  typified  them  most  com- 
pletely, as  the  documents  which  bring  be- 
fore you  the  men  themselves,  with  all  their 
hopes  and  fears  and  beliefs  and  doubts 
and  passions.  If  English  literature  is> 
more  intelligible  when  read  in  conjunction 
with  the  classics,  I  certainly  hold  that  our 
understanding  is  still  more  improved  by 
reading  it  in  conjunction  with  English 
history.  To  explain  myself  more  clearly,-" 
let  me  take  a  particular  instance.  Sup- 
pose, for  example,  that  you  wish  to  study 
Pope,  who,  of  course  represents  a  most 
important  moment  in  the  development  of 


88  THE    STUDY    OF 

English  literature.  Some  peculiarities  of 
Pope's  poetry  are  set  out  in  every  manual 
upon  English  literature.  There  is  his 
famous  theory  of  "  correctness  ; "  there  are 
the  limitations  which  he  accepted  or  intro- 
duced into  English  verse,  and  the  so-called 
conventionality  which  produced  the  so- 
called  reaction  of  Wordsworth  and  his 
school;  and  it  is,  of  course,  necessary  to 
know  what  were  the  peculiarities  thus  in- 
dicated and  what  was  the  history  of  their 
\growth  and  decay.  But  if  it  be  necessary 
(to  know  this,  it  is  necessary  also  to  pass 
beyond  this  knowledge.  Why  did  he 
adopt  these  canons  of  taste,  and  why  did 
they  so  impress  his  contemporaries?  No 
answer  can  be  suggested  from  the  bare 

[facts  themselves ;  you  must  feel  the  rela- 
tion between  the  facts  and  the  whole 
spirit  of  the  time. 

Pope,  again,  was,  after  a  fashion,  classi- 
cal. Some  of  his  best  forms  are  his  imita- 
tions of  Horace ;  and  his  most  popular 
was  the  translation  of  the  "  Iliad."  Some 
critics  indeed  tell  us  that  you  will  like 
Pope's  "Iliad  "  better  in  proportion  to  your 
ignorance  of  Homer's  "Iliad."  We  may 
grant,  in  spite  of  this,  that  the  enjoyment 
of  Pope  is  facilitated  by  a  knowledge  of 
Homer,  and  especially  of  Horace,  to  whom 
he  had  so  close  an  affinity.  Yet  the  ques- 
tion remains,  why  did  Pope  and  his  con- 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  89 

temporaries  venerate  the  classics?  why, 
for  example,  did  they  use  *  Gothic '  as 
simply  a  term  of  reproach  ?  what  was  the 
spirit  of  the  age  which  led  them  to  set  so 
high  a  value  upon  the  qualities  which  they 
recognized  in  classical  literature?  Unless 
we  can  give  some  sort  of  answer  to  such 
questions  we  must  fail  to  perceive  the  sig- 
nificance of  the  facts  we  observe,  or  to 
enter  really  into  the  spirit  of  our  author. 
To  give  an  answer  we  must  be  able  not 
merely  to  use  the  proper  formula  about 
certain  analogies,  but  to  transport  our- 
selves at  will  to  the  first  half  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century. 

Now,  I  shall  not  attempt  any  answer, 
but  I  shall  try  to  indicate  briefly  how  an 
answer  should,  in  my  opinion,  be  sought^ 
There  are,  as  I  conceive,  two  main  direc- 
tions of  study  relevant  to  such  an  inquiry. 
We  want  to  know  something  of  the  phil- 
osophy and,  still  more,  something  of  the 
social  conditions  of  the  time.  Pope's^ 
most  ambitious,  though  not  most  success- 
ful work,  is  the  '  Essay  on  Man.'  The 
'Essay  on  Man,'  is  a  kind  of  cento  from 
the  popular  writers  upon  philosophy  of 
the  day.  It  is  full  of  passages  taken 
almost  bodily  from  such  men  as  Samuel 
Clarke  and  Lord  Shaftesbury  and  Leibnitz, 
and  a  great  part  of  it  seems  to  have  been  a 
versification  of  the  prose  in  which  Boling- 


90  THE    STUDY   OF 

broke  very  rashly  expressed  his  views 
of  contemporary  philosophy.  Reading  it 
without  some  knowledge  of  these  doc- 
trines is  like  reading  modern  literature 
without  having  heard  of  Darwinism.  But 
the  importance  of  such  knowledge  is  not 
confined  to  this  particular  work,  still  less 
i  to  the  explanation  of  particular  phrases 
I  or  allusions.  It  is  important  because  the 
whole  tone  of  Pope's  poetry  is  determined 
' ;  by  his  immersion  in  the  speculations  of 
!  the  day.  Why  is  it,  for  example,  that 
whereas  Milton  sought  to  'justify  the 
ways  of  God  to  Man '  by  giving  a  concrete 
history  of  the  great  events  which  revealed 
the  Divine  purpose,  Pope  adopting  the 
same  phrase,  and  wishing  to  'vindicate 
the  ways  of  God  to  Man,'  proceeds  to 
versify  a  number  of  abstract  arguments  ? 
The  difference  was  imposed  by  the  con- 
ditions of  the  time,  by  all  the  differences 
to  which  we  refer  when  we  say  that  Mil- 
ton was  a  Puritan,  and  that  Pope  was  what 
has  been  called  a  Christian  Deist. 
^  To  understand  that  difference  we  must 
understand  something  of  the  philosophical 
history  of  the  day,  and  unless  we  under- 
stand it  we  shall  never  appreciate  the 
curiously  didactic  tendency  which  is  one 
of  the  marked  characteristics  not  only  of 
the  'Essay  on  Man,'  but  of  all  Pope's 
best  work,  and  of  most  of  the  best  work 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  9 1 

of  the  time,  and  which  leads  to  its  great- 
est fault,  the  confusion  between  the  proper 
spheres  of  poetry  and  of  logic.  To  per- 
ceive Pope's  drift,  to  understand  why  he 
adopts  modes  of  utterances  which  to  us 
seem  to  be  essentially  prosaic,  and  to 
recognize  the  poet  under  the  dealer  in 
epigrams  and  commonplaces,  we  must 
know  something  of  the  intellectual  revolu- 
tion ;  of  the  immense  breach  which  had 
taken  place  between  the  new  philosophy 
and  the  old  teaching  of  the  schools;  of 
the  vast  impressions  upon  the  imagina- 
tion as  well  as  upon  the  reason  of  New- 

1  ton's  gigantic  discoveries ;  of  the  change 
in  the  whole  modes  of  reasoning  involved 
in  Locke's  new  departure ;  of  the  kind  of 
deification  of  ' common  sense'  character- 
istic of  the  philosophy,  of  the  theology,  of 
the  politics,  and  therefore  also  of  the  litera- 
ture of  the  time.  We  must  appreciate 

/the  aspiration  expressed  in  Berkeley's 
famous  verses  for  a  time  when  men  shall 
cease  to  impose  for  truth  and  sense  *  the 
pedantry  of  courts  and  schools ; '  the  aspira- 
tion which  involved  an  appeal  from  learned 
recluses  and  monastics  wrapped  in  mystery 
to  the  clear  common  sense  of  a  circle  of 
educated  men.  That  spirit  shows  itself 
in  all  the  men  of  the  day  —  in  Berkeley, 
in  Addison,  in  Swift,  in  Shaftesbury,  in 
Bishop  Butler,  in  Bolingbroke,  not  less  than 


92  THE    STUDY    OF 

in  Pope ;  and  without  some  sense  of  that 
fact  you  will  be  at  a  loss  to  understand 
either  the  aims  or  the  methods  of  Pope 
and  his  contemporaries. 

Briefly,  to  understand  the  literature  you 
must  know  something  of  the  philosophy; 
and  this,  though  pre-eminently  true  of  a 
period  like  Pope's,  where  the  absence  of 
a  clear  distinction  is  a  special  character- 
istic, is  more  or  less  true  of  all  periods. 
Between  Shakespeare  and  Bacon,  between 
Dryden  and  Hobbes,  between  Shelley  and 
Godwin,  between  Scott  and  Burke,  be- 
tween Wordsworth's  poetry  and  Cole- 
ridge's philosophy,  there  is  more  than  a 
relation  of  contemporaneity.  I  do  not 
mean,  however,  that  any  profound  philo- 
sophical study  is  needed.  Far  from  it.  I 
only  mean  that  you  must  have  some  such 
acquaintance  with  the  general  drift  of 
thought  as  Pope  himself  possessed  — 
which,  to  say  the  truth,  was  superficial 
enough  —  before  you  can  fairly  appreci- 
ate him,  or  cease  to  be  repelled  by  some 
otherwise  unintelligible  peculiarities. 

But  still  more  necessary  is  a  study 
which,  in  truth,  is  closely  connected  with 
jthis.  The  study  of  the  philosophy  is 
most  intimately  connected  with  the  study 
of  society.  The  philosophical  movement 
was  congenial  to,  if  it  was  not  due  to,  the 
peculiar  conditions  of  society.  No  human 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  93 

being  was  ever  more  acutely  sensitive  to 
the  opinions  of  the  day  than  Pope.  No- 
body ever  reflected  more  accurately  the 
special  phrases  of  the  social  life.  The 
'  Rape  of  the  Lock/  the  'Dunciad,'  or  the 
prologue  and  epilogue  to  the  Satires,  all 
his  most  undeniable  successes,  first  take 
their  true  coloring  when  you  know  the 
people  for  whom  they  were  written ;  when 
you  have  a  clear  vision  of  Queen  Anne 
1  taking  sometimes  counsel  and  sometimes 
tea'  at  Hampton  Court,  quarrelling  with 
the  Duchess  of  Marlborough,  and  going 
to  meet  Harley  at  Mrs.  Masham's ;  when 
you  can  elect  yourself  a  member  of  Addi- 
son's  '  little  senate,'  where  Steele,  listen- 
ing reverentially  over  his  cups,  and  Bud- 
gell  and  Tickell  and  namby-pamby  Philips 
are  sitting  round  in  rapt  admiration,  or 
follow  the  great  man  to  Holland  House 
and  watch  him  writing  a  '  Spectator '  and 
revolving  round  two  foci,  each  marked  by 
a  bottle  of  port ;  or  sit  up  with  Swift  when 
he  gets  under  his  blankets  on  a  cold  night 
to  scribble  off  the  last  events  of  the  day 
to  Stella,  or  meet  the  '  Brothers  Club '  at 
dinner  to  discuss  the  proper  policy  of  the 
Tory  ministry ;  or  drive  over  with  Pope 
himself  in  a  chariot  to  sit  with  Bolingbroke 
under  a  hay-stack  and  talk  bad  meta- 
physics in  a  pasture  painted  with  spades 
and  rakes  j  or  let  his  waterman  row  you  up 


94  THE    STUDY    OF 

from  Westminister  stairs  to  see  his  garden 
and  present  a  crystal  for  his  grotto,  and 
talk  to  Gay  and  Swift  till  your  host  says, 
'Gentlemen,  I  leave  to  your  wine,'  and 
leaves  three  of  you  to  finish  the  pint  from 
which  he  has  deducted  two  glasses.  You 
must  follow  him  invisibly  to  his  bed,  where 
he  will  have  paper  and  pens  by  his  side,  lest 
he  should  wake  in  the  night,  parturient  of 
a  couplet,  and  have  no  proper  cfarrte"'  ready 
for  its  reception.  He  will  awake  raging 
over  some  smart  saying  attributed  to  Lady 
Mary  or  Lord  Hervey,  and  excogitate  a 
stinging  retort  to  be  remembered  at  this 
day  by  all  educated  men,  though  nine  out 
of  ten  may  have  forgotten  its  origin.  Or 
perhaps  he  will  add  a  tinge  of  bitterness 
to  one  of  the  passages  in  the  '  Dunciad,' 
where  he  lashes  his  multitudinous  foes, 
We  should  see  them,  too,  poor  wretches, 
far  away  in  the  recesses  of  Grub  street,  in 
the  garret  where  the  printer's  devil  finds 
them,  robed  in  an  old  sack  with  holes  for 
the  passage  of  their  arms,  and  desperately 
tearing  their  way  through  the  translation 
of  a  French  translation  of  a  classic,  with 
the  help  of  a  dictionary.  Nor  must  we' 
gorget  to  see  Pope  on  his  best  side ;  to  see 
how  his  eye  shines  and  his  lip  trembles 
when  he  turns  a  delicate  compliment  to 
an  old  friend ;  with  what  touching  gentle- 
ness he  fondles  his  old  mother,  as  Wai- 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  95 

pole  sneeringly  puts  it,  and  wakes,  perhaps, 
to  write  those  exquisite  verses  which  still  < 
show  us  what  true  feeling  lurked  in  the 
deformed    and    spiteful    little    bundle    of 
nerves : 

Me  let  the  tender  office  long  engage 

To  rock  the  cradle  of  reposing  age  ; 

With  lenient  arts,  extend  a  mother's  breath, 

Make  languor  smile,  and  sooth  the  bed  of  death  ; 

Explore  the  thought,  explain  the  asking  eye, 

And  keep  awhile  one  parent  from  the  sky. 

Carlyle  could  never  write  about  a  man 
till  he  had  framed  a  credible  portrait  of 
his  appearance.  Macaulay  used  to  ramble 
in  the  streets  of  London,  trying  to  recon- 
struct a  vision  of  the  houses  as  occupied 
by  the  old  generation  so  long  vanished 
from  sensible  perception.  To  make  some 
such  picture  as  a  background  for  our  poet 
is,  I  hold,  most  essential  for  a  clear  appre- 
ciation. We  shall  understand  the  con- 
ditions under  which  Pope  worked  when 
we  know  the  enemies,  big  and  small, 
whom  he  dreaded,  and  upon  whom  he  took 
vengeance ;  the  greater  men  whose  ap- 
proval he  courted  with  genuine  affection ; 
*  the  critical  circles,  who  revered  him  as  an 
{authority  because  he  adopted  and  reflected 
Vtheir  sentiments  with  unequalled  skill. 
His  best  poetry  is  the  incarnation  of  his 
and  their  conversation:  the  refined  and 
elaborated  essence  by  a  man  of  genius, 
full  of  such  epigrams  as  would  tell  with 


96  THE    STUDY    OF 

men  of  the  world,  drinking  at  the  coffee- 
houses or  meeting  for  friendly  suppers  to 
polish  their  wits  by  collision ;  deficient  in 
romance,  for  the  romantic  to  such  men 
suggested  the  ridiculous  and  the  old- 
fashioned;  teaching  by  direct  precept 
rather  than  by  imagery,  for  they  cared 
nothing  for  the  old  mythology ;  embody- 
ing commonplaces,  for  the  talk  of  such 
men  avoided  the  depths  and  the  raptures 
of  poetry,  and  yet  superabundantly  keen, 
sometimes  even  profound  in  substance, 
though  never  seeking  the  profound  at  the 
risk  of  obscurity ;  and  far  more  often 
really  tender,  though  shy  in  openly  re- 
pressing tenderness,  and  dreading  senti- 
mentality as  the  deadly  sin.  Feel  this; 
see  these  men  as  they  were,  and  so  you 
will  understand  why  Pope  uttered  him- 
self in  his  characteristic  fashion,  and  see 
the  real  power  which  was  hidden  under  an 
unfamiliar  mask. 

And  how  to  feel  this  ?  By  reading  some 
of  the  most  delightful  books  in  the  lan- 
guage. By  reading  Addison  and  Swift, 
and  Pope's  own  correspondence,  and  Lady 
Mary's  letters,  and  'Robinson  Crusoe,'  and 
*  Gulliver's  Travels,'  and  Gay  and  Parnell, 
and  a  crowd  of  smaller  writers,  just  as 
they  come  in  your  way.  Of  all  books  — 
but  I  speak  professionally,  for  I  refer  to 
my  own  trade  —  none  are  more  delightful 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  9/ 

than  good  biographies.1  I  will  not  sug- 
gest that  you  should  read  a  certain  dic- 
tionary of  biography,2  because  it  is  not  yet 
finished,  though  when  it  is  finished  you 
will  have,  in  fifty  moderately  thick  volumes, 
a  pretty  full  introduction  to  English  liter- 
ary history.  But  I  do  think  that  in  the 
study  of  biography  you  are  led  by  the 
pleasantest  of  paths  into  the  fullest  posses- 
sion of  that  concrete  picture  of  a  man's 
surroundings  which  I  should  desire  you  to 
possess.  I  will  take  one  example.  Let 
me  speak  from  my  own  experience.  I  had 
the  good  fortune,  when  a  boy,  to  read 
what  is  to  me,  I  will  confess,  the  most 
purely  delightful  of  all  books  —  I  mean 
Boswell's  'Life  of  Johnson.'  I  read  it 
from  cover  to  cover,  backwards  and  for- 
wards, over  and  over,  through  and  through, 
till  I  nearly  knew  it  by  heart ;  and  I  should 
like  nothing  better  than  to  read  it  again 
to-morrow.  Just  consider  to  what  a  circle 
you  are  introduced.  There  are  the  two 
main  figures,  forming  a  contrast  in  real 
life  scarcely  surpassible  by  Don  Quixote 
and  Sancho  Panza  —  Johnson,  physically, 

1  For  a  most  admirable  lecture  on  the  charms  of  biography  and 
its  value  to  young  people,  see  a  lecture  by  Phillips  Brooks  published 
in  volume  of  sermons,  entitled  "  Sermons  delivered  at  Phillips  (Exe- 
ter, N.  H.)  Academy." 

2  Reference  is  made  to  the  "  Dictionary  of  National  Biography," 
Edited  by  Leslie  Stephens,  twenty  volumes  of  the  fifty  announced 
have  been  published. 


98  THE    STUDY    OF 

a  giant  deformed  by  disease  and  infirmity  ; 
intellectually,  one  vast  mass  of  common 
sense  and  humorous  shrewdness,  masked 
by  outrageous  prejudices,  and,  morally, 
hiding  a  woman's  tenderness  and  a  hero's 
independence  of  spirit  under  the  rough- 
ness of  a  street  porter ;  a  man  who  begins 
by  disgusting  you,  who  soon  extorts  your 
respect,  and  who  ends  by  making  you  love 
him  like  a  dear  friend.  And  Boswell,  the 
inimitable,  who  has  something  amiable  in 
all  his  follies,  even  if  I  may  say  so,  in  his 
vices;  whose  vanity  is  redeemed  by  an 
unstinted  and  hearty  appreciation  of  ex- 
cellence which  amounts  to  genius ;  with 
whom  we  sympathise  because  he  lays  bare 
so  unsparingly  weaknesses  of  his  own, 
which,  as  our  own  conscience  tells  us,  are 
not  quite  without  certain  corresponding 
germs  in  our  own  bosoms,  who  thus  makes 
a  kind  of  vicarious  confession  for  us,  which 
we  enjoy  though  we  would  not  imitate ; 
whose  indomitable  gaiety,  whose  boundless 
powers  of  enjoying  every  excitement,  even 
the  excitement  of  confessing  his  sins  and 
making  good  resolutions  for  the  future, 
disarms  all  our  antipathies — this  unparal- 
leled fool  of  genius  attracts  us  as  much  as 
the  master  whose  steps  he  dogged,  and 
whose  very  foibles  he  copied. 

And    this  delightful  pair  are  only  the 
centre  of  a  circle.     Boswell  opens  the  door 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE.  99 

to  the  whole  literary  history  of  the  century. 
Johnson  comes  into  contact  in  his  youth 
with  Pope  and  Swift,  who  had  known  the 
wits  of  Charles's  days,  and  in  his  age  with 
Hannah  More,  who  made  a  pet  of  Ma- 
caulay,  and  with  Miss  Burney,  who  lived 
long  enough  to  have  made,  if  she  had 
chosen,  a  pet  of  me.  By  friendship  or 
hostility  he  touches  all  the  great  English- 
men of  his  time.  Think  only  of  three 
friends,  of  all  of  whom  Boswell  gives  us 
the  most  intimate  glimpses:  Burke,  in- 
comparably the  greatest  writer  upon  politi- 
cal philosophy  whom  these  islands  have 
ever  produced;  Goldsmith,  who  'touched 
nothing  that  he  did  not  adorn/  author  of 
some  of  the  most  exquisite  poetry  and  of 
the  most  exquisite  idyl  of  country  life  in 
our  language ;  and  Reynolds,  the  first  of 
English  painters,  who  still  preserves  for 
us  the  most  admirable  representations  of 
his  great  contemporaries,  and  whose  art 
seems  to  admit  us  to  the  most  charming 
domesticities  of  the  day,  and  might  teach 
even  women  to  find  a  new  charm  in  in- 
fancy." These  are  only  the  most  conspicu- 
ous figures  in  a  gallery  including  so  many 
eminent  figures,  and  full  of  characteristic 
touches  even  when  we  have  to  do  with 
their  hostile  encounters.  We  smile  now  at 
Johnson's  judgments  of  Rousseau,  whom 
he  would  have  sentenced  to  transportation, 


,7? 


IOO  THE    STUDY   OF 

Mi 


Homer,  whose  philosophy  he  re- 


ana  of 

garded  as  an  illustration  of  the  folly  of 
trying  to  milk  the  bull  when  you  are  not 
satisfied  with  the  cow.  To  know  an  epoch 
we  want  to  know  its  prejudices  as  well  as 
its  new  ideas,  and  of  the  most  dogged 
•  prejudices  we  certainly  find  an  ample  crop 
in  Boswell. 

And  where  should  we  find  a  better  illus- 
tration of  the  stalwart  loyalty  of  the  day 
than  in  Johnson's  two  famous  interviews 
with  George  III.  and  with  the  arch-dema- 
gogue Wilkes  —  the  last  the  very  gem  of 
Boswell's  unsurpassable  book.  '  Johnson,' 
says  Carlyle,  'was  the  last  of  the  Tories.' 
In  studying  Boswell  you  will  learn  to 
know  what  that  means.  When  you  have 
read  it  you  have  had  a  glimpse  both  of 
the  tendencies,  social  and  intellectual, 
which  were  thus  bringing  on  the  revolu- 
tion, and  of  that  huge  mass  of  manly,  pig- 
headed, prejudiced,  stupid,  judicious,  sel- 
fish, patriotic,  invincible  common  sense 
which  crushed  for  a  time  the  revolution- 
ist of  England,  though  it  was  far  indeed 
from  exterminating  the  seeds  of  a  pro- 
found revolution.  You  might  go  far  to 
complete  your  study  by  reading  two  de- 
ightful,  though  curiously  contrasted,  col- 
ections  of  letters  —  the  letters  of  the 
lovable  recluse  Cowper,  who  incidentally 
reveals  what  was  fermenting  in  quiet 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  IOI 

country  circles,  and  the  most  admirable 
letters  of  the  not  too  lovable  Walpole, 
which  will  show  you  what  was  going 
on  in  circles  which  scarcely  deigned  to 
cast  an  eye  upon  Johnson.  It  will  be  set 
before  you  by  an  observer  whom  Macaulay 
chooses  to  ridicule  as  a  fribble  unworthy 
of  serious  attention,  but  who,  if  I  be  not 
greatly  mistaken,  had,  beneath  all  his 
affectations,  one  of  the  keenest  eyes  of  all 
his  contemporaries,  and  who  certainly 
wrote  letters  unsurpassable  in  the  English 
language.  If  he  had  some  of  the  failings 
generally  attributed  to  the  French,  he 
had,  what  is  far  rarer,  some  of  the  high 
qualities  which  make  the  French  unri- 
valled as  memoir  writers  and  corresoond- 
ents. 

Through  sucn  readings,  I  have  said,  you 
gain  a  vivid  concrete  picture  of  the  men 
of  the  day.  You  will  learn  of  the  folly  of 
the  fashion,  now  dying  out,  of  simply 
abusing  the  eighteenth  century.1  You  will 
learn  how  many  men  then  lived  admirable 
domestic  lives,  how  much  there  was  of 
kindliness  and  good  feeling,  and  sincere 
wish  to  grapple  with  the  evils  of  the  day. 
Such  a  study  will  help,  as  I  have  hinted,  to 
a  genuine  appreciation  of  the  political,  the 

1  Read  a  vigorous  article  by  Frederic  Harrison  on  "  A  few  words 
about  the  Eighteenth  Century,"  in  the  Nineteenth  Century  for 
March,  1883,  also  to  be  found  in  Harrison's  "Choice  of  Books," 
complete  edition. 


IO2  THE    STUDY    OF 

social,  and  the  ecclesiastical  movements 
of  the  time.  And  therefore  by  the  same 
process  it  will  enable  you  to  enter  into 
the  literature  —  to  understand  Johnson's 
'Vanity  of  Human  Wishes '  and  '  Rasselas ' 
and  *  Lives  of  the  Poets,'  even,  it  may  be, 
his  '  Rambler/  which  I  admit  is  greatly  in 
need  of  some  shoeing-horn  —  to  delight 
in  Goldsmith's  *  Traveller/  and  'Vicar  of 
Wakefield/  to  enjoy  Gray's  exquisite  art, 
much  as  it  was  reviled  by  Johnson,  at  the 
same  time  that  you  will  penetrate  into  the 
priceless  treasure-trove  of  Burke's  politi- 
cal wisdom,  and  even  judge  more  wisely 
of  Gibbon's  monumental  history,  or  of 
Adam  Smith's  'Wealth  of  Nations/ 

You  may  be  inclined  to  say  that  I  am 
making  large  demands.  For  a  Macaulay 
jor  a  Carlyle,  who  wish  to  present  a  com- 
Iplete  picture  of  the  whole  complex  life  of 
ja  period,  such  reading  may  be  desirable 
or  necessary.  But  most  of  us  have  neither 
the  portentous  memory  of  Macaulay  nor 
the  imaginative  intensity  of  Carlyle,  nor 
the  opportunity  of  poring  over  the  old 
records  till  we  can  reclothe  the  dead  bones 
of  history.  To  this  I  reply,  first,  that  the 
time  required  is  not  so  very  great.  To 
read  Boswell  and  Walpole  and  Cowper,  to 
glance  over  a  few  old  periodicals  like  the 
'  Gentleman's  Magazine'  and  the  'Annual 
Register/  to  read  the  regular  histories  of 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE.  1O3 

the  day,  so  as  to  have  a  skeleton  map  of 
dates  and  facts,  requires  no  exclusive  ab- 
sorption in  the  study.  A  little  leisure 
and  a  little  enthusiasm  will  go  a  very 
long  way.  But  I  must  next  reply  that 
study  of  this  kind,  like  the  others  I  have 
mentioned,  is  still  in  one  respect  not  suffi- 
cient, and  in  another  not  necessary.  It 
is  not  sufficient,  because  after  all,  what  a 
man  wants  for  the  appreciation  of  books 
is  not  so  much  to  have  this  or  that  kind  of 
knowledge  as  to  be  a  clever  fellow  and  to 
have  a  sensitive  nature.  A  great  though 
misunderstood  philosopher,  called  Dog- 
berry, observed  that  'to  read  and  write 
comes  by  nature.'  With  proper  limits, 
that  aphorism,  as  applied  to  the  reading 
or  writing  of  books,  is  very  sound.  You 
want  faculties  which  cannot  be  put  into 
you,  if  they  are  absent,  by  any  education, 
and  which  have  a  provoking  way  of  assert- 
ing their  existence  —  to  the  great  con- 
fusion of  education  theorists  —  when  they 
have  received  none  of  the  orthodox  pabu- 
lum. I  don't  want  to  say  a  word  against 
education.  If  I  did,  indeed,  I  should 
probably  be  here  in  some  personal  danger. 
In  reality,  I  only  wish  to  argue  on  behalf 
of  a  wide  and  thorough  education.  But 
we  ought,  in  honesty,  to  recognize  one 
fact  sometimes  neglected.  A  good  educa- 
tion for  literary  purposes  is  by  no  means 


IO4  THE   STUDY   OF 

exclusively  an  education  in  literature.  To 
appreciate  Shakespeare  you  want  some- 
thing much  more  important  than  cram- 
ming with  facts.  To  enjoy  '  Romeo  and 
Juliet '  the  best  qualification  is  to  be 
one-and-twenty  (which  is  compatible  with 
being  also  thirty  or  forty).  To  enjoy 
'  Hamlet '  it  is,  perhaps,  better  to  be,  let 
us  say,  fifty-four.  The  education  which 
comes  through  life,  through  the  posses- 
sion of  certain  passions  and  feelings,  is 
the  most  important  of  all  education.  But, 
I  hasten  to  observe,  this  does  not  tell 
against  education  in  general,  but  only 
against  a  narrow  education  which  fails  to 
stimulate  all  our  powers.  The  best  way 
to  learn  military  arts  is  not  to  be  drilled 
in  them  from  childhood,  but  to  spend  many 
childish  hours  in  field  sports  and  games 
which  brace  the  nerves  and  sharpen  the 
eyes.  I  will  venture  to  say  what  may 
^sound  paradoxical. 

Of  all  studies  that  which  has  the  least 
in  common  with  literary  study  is,  I  sup- 
pose, the  study  of  mathematics.  I  will 
add  that  mathematicians  are  apt  to  acquire 
certain  rather  mistaken  prejudices  in  lite- 
rary matters.  But  if  I  were  asked  whether 
a  young  man  would  best  fit  himself  for  a 
literary  career  or  for  the  study  of  litera- 
ture by  reading  books  about  authors  or  by 
reading  mathematics  (supposing  him  to 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE.  1 05 

have  only  time  for  one  pursuit),  I  should 
unhesitatingly  advise  mathematics.  Not, 
of  course,  that  he  will  learn  anything 
directly  useful.  He  will  never  require  to 
apply  the  binomial  theorem  to  the  criti- 
cism of  'Paradise  Lost.'  But  an  exclu- 
sive reading  of  mere  criticism  on  literary 
history  has  a  strong  tendency  to  make  a 
man  a  prig,  to  suppress  all  spontaneous 
and  independent  judgment,  and  to  leave 
his  general  faculties  undeveloped.  A  study 
of  mathematics,  on  the  other  hand,  has 
been,  since  Plato's  days,  the  most  admir- 
able system  of  intellectual  gymnastics 
ever  devised ;  it  braces  and  invigorates  the 
mental  fibre,  it  makes  a  man  appreciate 
clear,  vigorous,  uncompromising  reason, 
and  familiarizes  him  with  the  most  per-  j 
fectly  adequate  expression  of  certain  forms 
of  thought.  Therefore,  though  he  has 
not  the  information  required,  though  he 
has  not  learnt  a  single  applicable  truth,  he 
has  so  far  the  advantage  of  coining  to  any 
study  with  vigorous  faculty,  with  a  trained 
perception  for  certain  essential  qualities 
of  all  good  work,  scientific  and  literary, 
and  without  being  sworn  to  the  special 
tenets  of  any  little  critical  school.  He  \ 
will  at  least  appreciate  the  cardinal  virtue  j 
of  clearness.  I  confess  that  I  attach 
more  importance  to  the  judgment  of  a"* 
man  of  vigorous  intellect  tackling  a  new 


r\ 

V 


IO6  THE    STUDY    OF 

book  without  any  knowledge  of  previous 
critical  dogmas  than  to  the  judgment  of 
the  professed  critic  of  less  vigor  who 
utters  his  opinions  in  mortal  fear  of 
contradicting  something  that  has  been 
said  by  Ste.-Beuve  or  Mr.  Matthew  Ar- 
nold. 

And  this  brings  me  to  the  second  point, 
that  such  training  as  I  have  suggested  is 
not  essential.  I  have  tried  to  show,  and 
it  is  my  firm  belief,  that  it  is  extremely 
useful,  especially  when  combined  with  all 
other  means  of  training.  But  I  cannot 
conclude  without  also  insisting  upon  the 
fact  that  even  if  it  be  not  attainable  there 
is  still  no  reason  why  a  man  should  not 
learn,  within  certain  limits,  to  enjoy  and 
appreciate  the  masterpieces  of  literature. 
This  is  rather  a  delicate  subject,  but  I 
must  seek  very  briefly  to  explain  what  I 
think.  There  is  an  old  controversy  as  to 
the  relative  value  of  the  critical  and  the 
vulgar  judgment  of  books.  At  times,  as 
in  the  familiar  cases  of  Bunyan  and  De- 
foe, the  vulgar  have  forced  the  critics  to 
accept  their  verdict.  At  times  the  criti- 
cal few  have  recognised  merit  which  has 
only  by  degrees  won  acceptance  with  the 
multitude.  The  critics,  like  the  vulgar, 
have  special  weaknesses  and  prejudices 
which  often  obscure  their  judgment. 
Without  arguing  the  point,  I  am  content 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  IO/ 

to  observe  that,  in  my  opinion,  lasting 
success  with  either  class  is  enough  to 
prove  merit,  and  that,  in  any  case,  the 
fact  that  the  ignorant  have  sometimes 
had  the  best  of  it  is  enough  to  prove  that 
an  ignorant  person  may  have  a  sound 
judgment.  He  has  the  great  advantage" 
of  spontaniety  —  of  admiring  a  thing  be- 
cause it  affects  him,  not  because  he  has 
been  told  that  he  ought  to  admire  it. 
/  To  preserve  this  spontaneity  in  all  our 
/judgments  should  be  one  of  our  very  first 
"/objects,  however  much  training  we  may 
/  undergo.  Sincerity  in  such  matters  is  of 
the  very  essence  of  all  sound  opinion. 
There  are,  I  think,  two  rules  in  this  ma1>" 
ter.  Never  persuade  yourself  that  you- 
like  what  you  don't  like ;  not  if  it  be 
'  Faust '  or  '  Hamlet/  or  the  '  Divina  Corn- 
media/  or  the  '  Iliad.'  Sham  liking  is  fai^ 
worse  than  honest  stupidity.  But,  again, 
do  not  presume  to  think  that  your  dis- 
like to  an  accepted  masterpiece  proves  it 
not  to  be  a  masterpiece.  The  chances  are 
a  thousand  or  a  million  to  one  that  you 
are  wrong,  and  not  all  the  generations 
which  have  accepted  them.  If  Shakes- 
peare was  not  a  poet,  Shakespeare's  in- 
fluence is  as  great  a  mystery  as  would  be 
the  elevation  of  Vesuvius  without  volcanic 
energy.  Confess,  therefore,  your  inca- 
pacity, and  by  all  means  confess  it  frankly, 


IO8  THE    STUDY    OF 

but  do  not  parade  it  as  a  discovery.  Try 
again,  and  see  if  Shakespeare  will  not 
improve.  If  he  doesn't,  try  to  explain 
why  he  has  impressed  other  people,  and 
calculate  the  chances  of  its  being  due  to 
their  folly  or  to  your  obtuseness. 

But  can  we  in  any  case  expect  a  genu- 
ine appreciation  without  preparatory  train- 
ing—  without  knowing  the  history  of  a 
book,  the  age  in  which  it  was  produced, 
the  parallel  phenomena  in  other  litera- 
tures, and  so  forth  ?  To  that  question  I 
think  that  an  answer  may  be  suggested 
by  one  fact  which  is  tolerably  familiar  to 
you  here,  and  which  I  mention  with  all 
due  reserve.  You  have  all  read  'Old 
Mortality.'  You  areacquainted  with Mause 
Headrigg  and  Ephraim  Macbriar  and  Bal- 
four  of  Burley.  Each  of  those  admirable 
types  of  the  old  Covenanters  is  familiar, 
beyond  the  familiarity  of  mere  literary 
students,  with  the  one  book  which  to  many 
Scots  in  their  rank  of  life  has  been  the 
whole  of  literature,  and  the  study  of  which 
was  the  only  preparatory  study  for  one  of 
the  masterpieces  of  our  language,  the 
'Pilgrim's  Progress.'  The  Bible  is  read 
by  millions  who  know  hardly  any  other 
book,  and  who  know  and  care  nothing  for 
any  auxiliary  study.  To  them,  of  course, 
it  is  something  far  more  than  a  mere  lite- 
rary study.  But  do  they  or  do  they  not 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  IO9 

appreciate,  for  example,  the  Psalms  of 
David  —  not  simply  as  inspired  docu- 
ments, but  as  exalted  poetry  ?  If  I  may 
take  Scott's  judgment,  as  represented  in 
such  characters  as  Mause  Headrigg  or 
Davie  Deans,  the  answer  is  not  perfectly 
simple.  Such  people,  he  would  obviously 
say,  managed  to  find  what  they  sought; 
the  phrase  about  smiting  the  Amalekite 
hip  and  thigh  suited  them  better  than  the 
precept  of  turning  the  second  cheek ;  they 
found  a  pattern  in  Jael's  treatment  of 
Sisera,  and  somehow  failed  to  pay  equal 
attention  to  the  parable  of  the  Good  Sam- 
aritan. And,  moreover,  Scott  would  have 
said,  or  we  may  certainly  say  for  him,  that 
their  views  of  history  would  not  have 
been  those  of  the  most  judicious  inquirers, 
and  that  they  had  very  erroneous  opinions 
as  to  the  circumstances  and  times  under 
which  the  Old  and  New  Testaments  were 
composed.  Yet  as  evidently  they  were 
profoundly  influenced  by  their  studies ; 
the  Biblical  language  and  history  had 
entered  into  their  very  souls  ;  and  the 
narrative  which  they  revered,  the  Psalms 
which  became  their  battle-cry,  had  no 
small  share  in  generating  that  heroic 
courage  under  torture  and  defeat  which 
Scott,  with  all  his  Cavalier  prejudices 
and  all  his  abhorrence  of  Jacobinism,  can- 
not help  recognizing,  as  a  chivalrous 


IIO  THE    STUDY    OF 

antagonist,  amongst  the  persecuted  Cove- 
nanters. 

Now,  making  all  due  corrections,  we 
may,  I  think,  deduce  from  this  instance 
some  of  the  limitations  and  merits  of  un- 
trained reading.  The  man  who  reads 
1  without  note  or  comment/ trusts  to  his 
own  unaided  sagacity,  and  makes  no  auxili- 
ary studies,  has  undoubtedly  some  enor- 
mous disadvantages.  He  will  be  liable  to 
error  if  he  reasons  upon  the  books  he  loves 
as  historical  documents  ;  for,  of  course,  it 
is  essential  in  that  view  to  know  all  that 
can  be  known  of  the  time  and  conditions 
of  authorship.  He  will  be  liable  to  blunder 
if  he  speaks  as  a  critic;  he  may  cite  as 
proofs  of  original  genius  what  is  mani- 
festly borrowed,  and  entirely  misconceive 
the  true  relations  of  his  favorite  books  to 
other  literature,  Lamb,  who  read  the 
English  drama  as  a  lover,  who  entered 
into  its  spirit  as  no  one  has  done,  and 
interprets  it  with  unrivalled  felicity,  only 
illustrated  his  own  want  of  knowledge 
when  he  ventured  upon  asserting  the 
superiority  of  Marlowe's  '  Dr.  Faustus ' 
to  Goethe's  '  Faust.' 

The  simple  reader,  again,  who  reads 
like  Lamb,  is  specially  likely  to  read  into 
books  where  he  should  read  out  of  them  ; 
to  attribute  to  the  authors  his  own  thoughts, 
and  to  find  edification  like  the  proverbial 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  Ill 

old  lady  in  the  blessed  word  '  Mesopotamia' 
—  to  confound  between  an  author's  mean- 
ing and  the  thoughts  which  he  accidentally 
suggests.  To  be  fair,  we  should  perhaps 
add  that  the  most  ignorant  of  critics  can 
hardly  excel  some  philosophical  commen- 
tators in  this  respect — German  critics  of 
Shakespeare,  for  example.  But  for  mere 
literary  purposes  this  failing  is  of  less 
importance  than  the  opposite  error — the 
error  of  leaving  out  instead  of  adding; 
the  ignorant  reader  not  only  misses  special 
allusions  to  facts  or  to  previous  writers, 
but  frequently  a  writer's  whole  drift :  the 
covert  satire  which  is  really  the  vitalising 
salt  of  an  epigram ;  the  political  or  philo- 
sophical inference  which  is  suggested  in- 
stead of  bluntly  stated;  he  fails  to  per- 
ceive the  intensity  of  passion  which  burns 
under  a  studiously  compressed  manner,  or 
the  sagacity  which  pierces  some  current 
sophism  by  the  assertion  of  some  obvious 
truth  now  looking  like  a  commonplace ;  and 
he  is  kept  at  a  distance  by  some  mannerism 
or  conventional  mode  of  speech  which 
really  only  lies  on  the  surface.  Shakes- 
peare's Ulysses  speaks  of  that  '  touch  of 
nature  which  makes  the  whole  world  kin/ 
that 

With  one  consent  praise  newborn  gauds, 
Though  they  are  made  and  moulded  of  things  past, 
And  give  to  dust  that  is  a  little  gilt 
More  laud  than  gilt  o'erdusted. 


112  THE    STUDY    OF 

We  all  more  or  less  suffer  from  the  illusion 
which  leads  us  to  value  the  coinage,  not 
in  proportion  to  its  intrinsic  value,  but  to 
the  gloss  of  novelty  and  to  the  modern- 
ness  of  the  image  and  superscription.  It 
is  the  common  error,  in  short,  which 
makes  us  prefer  the  last  volumes  from  the 
circulating  library  to  Scott  or  Fielding,  or 
to  regard  the  last  leading  article  as  eclips- 
ing Junius  or  even  the  '  Letters  on  a  Regi- 
cide Peace.'  It  is  right,  indeed,  as  well 
as  almost  inevitable,  that  we  should  be 
toiore  interested  by  our  contemporaries 
than  by  writers  of  the  past ;  but  it  is  un- 
desirable, it  is  indeed  fatal  to  true  literary 
appreciation,  that  we  should  be  deluded 
by  this  error  of  intellectual  perspective 
into  misconceiving  the  true  magnitude  of 
the  fixed  stars  of  literature  when  we  are 
blinded  by  the  meteors  of  to-day.  And 
this  is  precisely  the  main  use  of  those 
auxiliary  studies  of  which  I  have  spoken. 
Since  the  great  men  lose  some  influence 
by  not  being  our  contemporaries,  we  must 
be  able  to  make  ourselves  their  contempo- 
raries ;  to  get  rid  of  this  common  illusion  ; 
to  overcome  an  obstacle  which,  though 
often  trifling  in  itself,  may  frequently 
generate  a  complete  incapacity  for  per- 
ceiving the  true  relations  of  things,  and 
:  permanently  withhold  from  us  possessions 
\  which,  when  we  have  once  made  a  little 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  113 

effort,    become   invaluable.     It  is   briefly 
the  function  of  such  study  to  rub  off  the 
dust  which  makes  the  gold  less  attractive— ^ 
than  the  base  metal  gilt. 

In  this  sense,  the  use  of  such  studies, 
however  great,  is  yet  negative,  They  re- 
move a  film  from  our  eyes,  but  cannot  of 
themselves  give  us  eyesight.  The  reading 
of  the  ignorant  man  has  often  the  super- 
lative advantage,  that  it  is  a  reading  of 
love.  The  greatest  writers  show  their 
power  in  nothing  more  than  this,  that  they 
put  so  much  inextinguishable  fire  into 
their  work  that  even  at  the  distance  of 
centuries,  with  all  the  disadvantages  of 
unfamiliar  language  and  unintelligible  allu- 
sions, and  half  unintelligible  purpose,  the 
glow  can  be  felt  beneath  the  drift  and 
accumulation  of  centuries  by  men  who  are 
congenial  in  soul  though  unprepared  by 
culture,  Keats  could  feel  the  charm  of 
Homer  through  the  translation  of  Chap- 
man, though  Chapman  had  been  dead  for 
two  centuries  and  Homer  belonged  to  an 
almost  prehistoric  world.  The  Psalms  of 
David,  I  have  said,  stir  millions  who  have 
no  preparatory  knowledge  except  of  their 
own  language.  And  frequently  a  man  can 
wrestle  and  struggle  into  a  perception  of 
the  essential  meaning  and  beauty  of  a 
great  author  with  surprisingly  little  train- 
ing. But,  as  a  rule,  such  a  feat  can  only 


\ 


114  THE    STUDY   OF 

be  achieved  by  men  of  abnormal  intelli- 
gence. Judicious  training  can  greatly 
diminish  the  impediments  which  keep  at 
bay  all  but  the  keenest  intelligence,  and 
help  to  complete  the  knowledge  and 
strengthen  the  perceptions  even  of  the 
keenest.  Most  of  us  are  absolutely  in 
need  of  it,  and  every  one  may  be  helped 
by  it.  Yet  that  is  not  enough  unless  the 
patient  can  also  minister  to  himself ;  unless 
he  has  that  intense  appetite  for  the~study 
which  will  sometimes  overcome  all  appar- 
ent obstacles,  though  it  will  be  the  keener 
when  the  obstacles  are  removed.  To  teach 
so  as  to  stimulate  that  appetite  and  not 
to  quench  it  it  by  irrelevant  cram  is  the 
great  problem  for  the  teacher.  And 
therefore  I  will  add  one  corollary :  as  a 
rule,  the  best  way  of  beginning  the  study 
of  literature  is  to  read  that  book  which 
you  can  read  with  pleasure,  or,  if  possible, 
with  enthusiasm.  I  will  not  say —  I  wish 
I  could  —  that  there  are  no  mischievous 
books.  But  (making  obvious  deductions) 
I  am  quite  ready  to  accept  with  Gibbon 
the  'tolerating  maxim  of  the  elder  Pliny' 
that  there  is  hardly  any  book  from  which 
you  cannot  derive  some  good.  I  am  con- 
vinced that  no  reading  is  good  which  is 
not  in  some  degree  reading  with  an  appe- 
tite. I  am  almost  ready  to  invert  the 
maxim,  and  to  say  that  all  reading  with 
an  appetite  is  necessarily  good. 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE.  115 

Some  distinguished  men  have  recently 
been  amusing  themselves  with  the  insolu- 
ble problem,  Which  are  the  best  hundred 
books?1  I  say  insoluble,  because  to  my 
mind  the  best  book  for  any  man  is  that 
in  which  he  takes  most  interest ;  and 
as  men's  powers  and  tastes  vary  indefi- 
nitely, and  there  is  no  power  and  no 
ftaste  which  may  not  be  stimulated  by 
[reading,  so  the  suitability  of  books  de- 
jpends  upon  the  idiosyncrasy  of  the  reader. 
One  man  prefers  metaphysics  and  another 
poetry ;  one  is  a  devourer  of  novels  and 
another  of  biography,  and  a  third  of  travels, 
and  a  fourth  of  history,  and  a  fifth  of 
antiquarian  research,  and  a  sixth  of  theo- 
logical controversy,  and  a  seventh  of  poli- 
tics ;  one  likes  the  classics  and  another 
Oriental  or  modern  English  literature  ;  one 
is  an  enthusiast  for  Scott,  and  one  for 

1  "  You  hear  a  great  deal  nowadays  of  the  worst  nonsense  ever 
uttered  since  men  were  born  on  earth.  Best  hundred  of  books! 
Have  you  ever  yet  read  one  good  book  well?  For  a  Scotchman, 
next  to  his  Bible,  there  is  but  one  book,  his  native  land  ;  but  one 
language,  his  native  tongue  —  the  sweetest,  richest,  subtlest,  most 
musical  of  all  the  living  dialects  of  Europe.  Study  your  Burns, 
Scott,  and  Carlyle.  Scott,  in  his  Scottish  novels  only,  and  of  those 
only  the  cheerful  ones,  with  the  Heart  of  Midlothian,  but  not  the 
Bride  ofLammermoor,  nor  the  Legend  of  Montrose,  nor  the  Pirate* 
Here  is  a  right  list :  Waverly,  Guy  Mannering,  The  A  ntiquary, 
Rob  Roy,  Old  Mortality,  The  Monastery,  The  Abbot,  Red  Gaunt- 
let, Heart  of  Midlothian.  Get  any  of  them  you  can,  in  the  old 
large  print  edition  when  you  have  a  chance,  and  study  every  sen- 
tence in  them.  They  are  models  of  every  virtue  in  their  order  of 
literature  and  exhaustive  codes  of  Christian  wisdom  and  ethics." 
— John  Ruskin. 


Il6  THE    STUDY   OF 

Coleridge,  and  a  third  for  Alexandra  Du- 
mas, and  so  forth.  Which  is  the  best? 
That  depends  on  the  man  ;  but  all  are  good, 
and  whichever  rouses  his  mind  most,  and 
commands  his  sympathies  most  powerfully, 
is  in  all  probability  the  best  for  him. 
^Literature  represents  all  the  reasonings 
and  feelings  and  passions  of  civilised  men 
Jin  all  ages.  As  Coleridge  says  — 

All  thoughts,  all  passions,  all  desires, 
Whatever  stirs  this  mortal  frame, 

All  are  but  ministers  of  Love, 
And  feed  his  sacred  flame. 

/  We  may  apply  the  words  to  genius.     To 
j  select  any  particular  variety  as  best  for 
I   all  is  as  absurd  as  to  say  that  every  man 
'    ought  to   be  a  priest  or  that  every  man 
ought  to  be  a  soldier.     But  this  I  may  say, 
Take  hold  anywhere,  read  what  you  really 
like  and  not  what  some  one  tells  you  that 
jou  ought  to  like;  let   your   reading   be 
$j*  j  |Part  °f  your  lives.     It  may  have  a  bear- 
ling  upon  your  true  interests  and  the  func- 
tion which  you  are  to  discharge   in    the 
world ;  or  it  may  be  a  relief  to  the  occupa- 
-tions  in  which  you  are  immersed.     Even 
if  it  be  a  mere  recreation,  let  it  be  such  a 
recreation  as  may  be  subservient  to  your 
highest  development  —  a  rule  which  is  of 
course   applicable   to   every  employment, 
from  preaching  to  playing  football.     But, 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE.  1 1/ 

in  any  case,  remember  that  reading  worthy 
of  the  name  is  not  the  acquisition  of  a  set 
of  dates  and  facts,  or  a  knowledge  of  the 
correct  critical  labels,  but  an  occupation 
which  to  be  pursued  to  any  purpose  must 
be  pursued  with  zeal — must  become,  if  it 
should  not  begin  by  being,  a  real  and  keen 
enjoyment,  and  which  should  end  by  be- 
coming not  a  mere  luxury  but  a  necessity 
of  life. 

If  there  should  be  some  people  who 
find,  after  all,  that  reading  anything  is  a 
bore,  I  shall  simply  point  out  to  them 
that  there  are  many  occupations  besides 
reading,  and  some  of  them  quite  as  use- 
ful. You  may  study  science  and  art,  or 
be  active  philanthropists,  though  you 
never  read  anything  more  nearly  ap- 
proaching literature  than  Euclid  or  the 
reports  of  the  association  for  the  benefit 
of  distressed  washerwomen.  Literature 
should  be  content  with  its  genuine  wor- 
shippers, and  not  stoop  to  enlist  the  ser- 
vices of  mere  hypocrites.  But  I  am 
equally  certain  that  most  of  us  can  find 
something  to  read,  something  the  reading 
of  which  can  become  a  ruling  passion, 
something,  too,  which  will  please  our  in- 
tellects, give  keenness  to  our  perceptions 
and  strength  to  our  sympathies,  something 
which  will  make  us  better  specimens  of 
the  human  race,  and  more  fitted  to  dis 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE. 


charge  any  of  the  duties  which  lie  before 
us.  And  if  fully  to  qualify  ourselves  re- 
quires a  struggle,  it  is  a  struggle  which 
will  bring  an  ample  reward. 


THE    END. 


14  DAY  USE 

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LOAN  DEPT. 

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on  the  date  to  which  renewed. 
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Berkeley 

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